Man and his Symbols

Man

and his Symbols

conceived and edited by

Carl G. Jung

The first and only work in which Carl
G. Jung, the world-famous Swiss psy-
chologist, explains to the general reader
his greatest contribution to our knowl-
edge of the human mind: the theory of
the importance of symbolism— particu-
larly as revealed in dreams.

Man and his
Symbols
Carl G. Jung

But for a dream, this book would never
have been written. That dream — de-
scribed by John Freeman in the Fore-
word-convinced Jung that he could,
indeed should, explain his ideas to those
who have no special knowledge of psy-
chology. At the age of eighty-three,
Jung worked out the complete plan for
this book, including the sections that
he wished his four closest associates to
write. He devoted the closing months
of his life to editing the work and writ-
ing his own key section, which he com-
pleted only ten days before his death.

Throughout the book, Jung empha-
sizes that man can achieve wholeness
only through a knowledge and accept-
ance of the unconscious— a knowledge
acquired through dreams and their
symbols. Every dream is a direct, per-
sonal, and meaningful communication
to the dreamer— a communication that
uses the symbols common to all man-
kind but uses them always in an entire-
ly individual way, which can be inter-
preted only by an entirely individual
key.

( Continued on back flap)

Man and his Symbols

Man and his Symbols
Carl G. Jung

and M.-L. von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Jolande Jacobi, Aniela Jaffe'

Anchor Press *

Doubleday

New York London Toronto Sydney Auckland

Editor: Carl G. Jung

and after his death M.-L. von Franz

Co-ordinating Editor: John Freeman

Aldus Editors
Text: Douglas Hill
Design: Michael Kitson

Assistants: Marian Morris, Gilbert Doel, Michael Lloyd

Research: Margery MacLaren

Advisers: Donald Berwick, Norman MacKenzie

\

An Anchor Press book

Published by Doubleday a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc., 666 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10103

Anchor Press and the portrayal of an anchor are trademarks
of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc.

© 1964 J.G. FERGUSON PUBLISHING
except chapter 2 entitled «Ancient myths and modern
man» by Dr. Joseph L. Henderson, where copyright in
this chapter within the United States of America is
expressly disclaimed.

Library of Congress Catalog Card No: 64-18631
ISBN 0-385-05221-9

First published in the United States of America in 1964

Reprinted in 1968, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1979, 1983, 1988

Printed and bound in Spain by TONSA, San Sebastian

Introduction: John Freeman

The origins of this book are sufficiently unusual to be of interest, and
they bear a direct relation to its contents and what it sets out to do. So
let me tell you just how it came to be written.

One day in the spring of 1959 the British Broadcasting Corporation
invited me to interview for British television Dr. Carl Gustav Jung.
The interview was to be done “in depth.” I knew little enough at that
time about Jung and his work, and I at once went to make his acquaint-
ance at his beautiful lakeside home near Zurich. That was the beginning
of a friendship that meant a great deal to me and, I hope, gave some
pleasure to Jung in the last years of his life. The television interview
has no further place in this story, except that it was accounted successful
and that this book is by an odd combination of circumstances an end-
product of that success.

One man who saw Jung on the screen was Wolfgang Foges, manag-
ing director of Aldus Books. Foges had been keenly interested in the
development of modern psychology since his childhood, when he lived
near the Freuds in Vienna. And as he watched Jung talking about his
life and work and ideas, Foges suddenly reflected what a pity it was
that, while the general outline of Freud’s work was well known to
educated readers all over the Western world, Jung had never managed
to break through to the general public and was always considered too
difficult for popular reading.

Foges, in fact, is the creator of Man and his Symbols. Having sensed
from the TV screen that a warm personal relation existed between
Jung and myself, he asked me whether I would join him in trying to
persuade Jung to set out some of his more important and basic ideas in
language and at a length that would be intelligible and interesting to
non-specialist adult readers. I jumped at the idea and set off once more
to Zurich, determined that I could convince Jung of the value and
importance of such a work. Jung listened to me in his garden for two
hours almost without interruption— and then said no. He said it in the
nicest possible way, but with great firmness; he had never in the past
tried to popularize his work, and he wasn’t sure that he could success-
fully do so now ; anyway, he was old and rather tired and not keen to
take on such a long commitment about which he had so many doubts.

Jung’s friends will all agree with me that he was a man of most
positive decision. He would weigh up a problem with care and without

hurry; but when he did give his answer, it was usually final. I returned
to London greatly disappointed, but convinced that Jung’s refusal was
the end of the matter. So it might have been, but for two intervening
factors that I had not foreseen.

One was the pertinacity of Foges, who insisted on making one more
approach to Jung before accepting defeat. The other was an event that,
as I look back on it, still astonishes me.

The television program was, as I have said, accounted successful. It
brought Jung a great many letters from all sorts of people, many of
them ordinary folk with no medical or psychological training, who had
been captivated by the commanding presence, the humor, and the
modest charm of this very great man, and who had glimpsed in his
view of life and human personality something that could be helpful to
them. And Jung was very pleased, not simply at getting letters (his
mail was enormous at all times) but at getting them from people who
would normally have no contact with him.

It was at this moment that he dreamed a dream of the greatest
importance to him. (And as you read this book, you will understand
just how important that can be.) He dreamed that, instead of sitting
in his study and talking to the great doctors and psychiatrists who used
to call on him from all over the world, he was standing in a public
place and addressing a multitude of people who were listening to him
with rapt attention and understanding what he said. . . .

When, a week or two later, Foges renewed his request that Jung
should undertake a new book designed, not for the clinic or the philo-
sopher’s study, but for the people in the market place, Jung allowed
himself to be persuaded. He laid down two conditions. First, that the
book should not be a single-handed book, but the collective effort of
himself and a group of his closest followers, through whom he had
attempted to perpetuate his methods and his teaching. Secondly, that I
should be entrusted with the task of co-ordinating the work and resolv-
ing any problems that might arise between the authors and the
publishers.

Lest it should seem that this introduction transgresses the bounds of
reasonable modesty, let me say at once that I was gratified by this
second condition — but within measure. For it very soon came to my
knowledge that Jung’s reason for selecting me was essentially that he

regarded me as being of reasonable, but not exceptional, intelligence
and without the slightest serious knowledge of psychology. Thus I was
to Jung the “average reader” of this book; what I could understand
would be intelligible to all who would be interested; what I boggled
at might possibly be too difficult or obscure for some. Not unduly flat-
tered by this estimate of my role, I have none the less scrupulously in-
sisted (sometimes, I fear, to the exasperation of the authors) on having
every paragraph written and, if necessary, rewritten to a degree of
clarity and directness that enables me to say with confidence that this
book in its entirety is designed for and addressed to the general reader,
and that the complex subjects it deals with are treated with a rare and
encouragipg simplicity.

After much discussion, the comprehensive subject of this book was
agreed to be Man and his Symbols; and Jung himself selected as his
collaborators in the work Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz of Zurich, per-
haps his closest professional confidante and friend; Dr. Joseph L. Hen-
derson of San Francisco, one of the most prominent and trusted of
American Jungians ; Mrs. Aniela Jaffe of Zurich, who, in addition to
being an experienced analyst, was Jung’s confidential private secretary
and his biographer; and Dr. Jolande Jacobi, who after Jung himself
is the most experienced author among Jung’s Zurich circle. These four
people were chosen partly because of their skill and experience in the
particular subjects allocated to them and partly because all of them
were completely trusted by Jung to work unselfishly to his instructions
as members of a team. Jung’s personal responsibility was to plan the
structure of the whole book, to supervise and direct the work of his
collaborators, and himself to write the keynote chapter, “Approaching
the Unconscious.”

The last year of his life was devoted almost entirely to this book, and
when he died in June 1961, his own section was complete (he finished
it, in fact, only some 10 days before his final illness) and his colleagues’
chapters had all been approved by him in draft. After his death, Dr.
von Franz assumed over-all responsibility for the completion of the
book in accordance with Jung’s express instructions. The subject matter
of Man and his Symbols and its outline were therefore laid down —
and in detail — by Jung. The chapter that bears his name is his work
and (apart from some fairly extensive editing to improve its intelligi-

bility to the general reader) nobody else’s. It was written, incidentally,
in English. The remaining chapters were written by the various authors
to Jung’s direction and under his supervision. The final editing of the
complete work after Jung’s death has been done by Dr. von Franz with
a patience, understanding, and good humor that leave the publishers
and myself greatly in her debt.

Finally as to the contents of the book itself:

Jung’s thinking has colored the world of modern psychology more
than many of those with casual knowledge realize. Such familiar terms,
for instance, as “extravert,” “introvert,” and “archetype” are all
Jungian concepts — borrowed and sometimes misused by others. But his
overwhelming contribution to psychological understanding is his con-
cept of the unconscious — not (like the unconscious of Freud) merely
a sort of glory-hole of repressed desires, but a world that is just as much
a vital and real part of the life of an individual as the conscious,
“cogitating” world of the ego, and infinitely wider and richer. The
language and the “people” of the unconscious are symbols, and the
means of communications dreams.

Thus an examination of Man and his Symbols is in effect an exami-
nation of man’s relation to his own unconscious. And since in Jung’s
view the unconscious is the great guide, friend, and adviser of the
conscious, this book is related in the most direct terms to the study of
human beings and their spiritual problems. We know the unconscious
and communicate with it (a two-way service) principally by dreams;
and all through this book (above all in Jung’s own chapter) you will
find a quite remarkable emphasis placed on the importance of dream-
ing in the life of the individual.

It would be an impertinence on my part to attempt to interpret
Jung’s work to readers, many of whom will surely be far better quali-
fied to understand it than I am. My role, remember, was merely to
serve as a sort of “intelligibility filter” and by no means as an inter-
preter. Nevertheless, I venture to offer two general points that seem
important to me as a layman and that may possibly be helpful to other
non-experts. The first is about dreams. To Jungians the dream is not a
kind of standardized cryptogram that can be decoded by a glossary
of symbol meanings. It is an integral, important, and personal expres-
sion of the individual unconscious. It is just as “real” as any other

phenomenon attaching to the individual. The* dreamer’s individual
unconscious is communicating with the dreamer alone and is selecting
symbols for its purpose that have meaning to the dreamer and to
nobody else. Thus the interpretation of dreams, whether by the analyst
or by the dreamer himself, is for the Jungian psychologist an entirely
personal and individual business (and sometimes an experimental and
very lengthy one as well) that can by no means be undertaken by
rule of thumb.

The converse of this is that the communications of the unconscious
are of the highest importance to the dreamer — naturally so, since the
unconscious is at least half of his total being- and frequently offer him
advice or guidance that could be obtained from no other source. Thus,
when I described Jung’s dream about addressing the multitude, I was
not describing a piece of magic or suggesting that Jung dabbled in
fortune telling. I was recounting in the simple terms of daily experience
how Jung was “advised” by his own unconscious to reconsider an
inadequate judgment he had made with the conscious part of his mind.

Now it follows from this that the dreaming of dreams is not a matter
that the well-adjusted Jungian can regard as simply a matter of
chance. On the contrary, the ability to establish communications with
the unconscious is a part of the whole man, and Jungians “teach”
themselves (I can think of no better term) to be receptive to dreams.
When, therefore, Jung himself' was faced with the critical decision
whether or not to write this book, he was able to draw on the resources
of both his conscious and his unconscious in making up his mind. And
all through this book you will find the dream treated as a direct, per-
sonal, and meaningful communication to the dreamer — a communica-
tion that uses the symbols common to ajl mankind, but that uses them
on every occasion in an entirely individual way that can be interpreted
only by an entirely individual “key.”

The second point I wish to make is about a particular characteristic
of argumentative method that is common to all the writers of this book
- perhaps to all Jungians. Those who have limited themselves to living
entirely in the world of the conscious and who reject communication
with the unconscious bind themselves by the laws of conscious, formal
life. With the infallible (but often meaningless) logic of the algebraic
equation, they argue from assumed premises to incontestably deduced

conclusions. Jung and his colleagues seem to me (whether they know it
or not) to reject the limitations of this method of argument. It is not
that they ignore logic, bu.t they appear all the time to be arguing to the
unconscious as well as to the conscious. Their dialectical method is itself
symbolic and often devious. They convince not by means of the nar-
rowly focused spotlight of the syllogism, but by skirting, by repetition,
by presenting a recurring view of the same subject seen each time from
a slightly different angle — until suddenly the reader who has never
been aware of a single, conclusive moment of proof finds that he has
unknowingly embraced and taken into himself some wider truth.

Jung’s arguments (and those of his colleagues) spiral upward over
his subject like a bird circling a tree. At first, near the ground, it sees
only a confusion of leaves and branches. Gradually, as it circles higher
and higher, the recurring aspects of the tree form a wholeness and
relate to their surroundings. Some readers may find this “spiraling”
method of argument obscure or even confusing for a few pages— but
not, I think, for long. It is characteristic of Jung’s method, and very
soon the reader will find it carrying him with it on a persuasive and
profoundly absorbing journey.

The different sections of this book speak for themselves and require
little introduction from me. Jung’s own chapter introduces the reader
to the unconscious, to the archetypes and symbols that form its langu-
age and to the dreams by which it communicates. Dr. Henderson in
the following chapter illustrates the appearance of several archetypal
patterns in ancient mythology, folk legend, and primitive ritual. Dr.
von Franz, in the chapter entitled “The Process of Individuation,”
describes the process by which the conscious and the unconscious
within an individual learn to know, respect, and accommodate one
another. In a certain sense this chapter contains not only the crux of
the whole book, but perhaps the essence of Jung’s philosophy of life:
Man becomes whole, integrated, calm, fertile, and happy when (and
only when) the process of individuation is complete, when the con-
scious and the unconscious have learned to live at peace and to com-
plement one another. Mrs. Jaffe, like Dr. Henderson, is concerned
with demonstrating, in the familiar fabric of the conscious, man’s
recurring interest in — almost obsession with— the symbols of the un-
conscious, They have for him a profoundly significant, almost a nour-

ishing and sustaining, inner attraction — whether they occur in the
myths and fairy tales that Dr. Henderson analyzes or in the visual arts,
which, as Mrs. Jaffe shows, satisfy and delight us by a constant appeal
to the unconscious.

Finally, I must say a brief word about Dr. Jacobi's chapter, which
is somewhat separate from the rest of the book. It is in fact an abbre-
viated case history of one interesting and successful analysis. The value
of such a chapter in a book like this is obvious ; but two words of warn-
ing are nevertheless necessary. First, as Dr. von Franz points out, there
is no such thing as a typical Jungian analysis. There can’t be, because
every dream is a private and individual communication, and no two
dreams use the symbols of the unconscious in the same way. So every
Jungian analysis is unique — and it is misleading to consider this one,
taken from Dr. Jacobi’s clinical files (or any other one there has ever
been), as “representative” or “typical.” All one can say of the case of
Henry and his sometimes lurid dreams is that they form one true
example of the way in which the Jungian method may be applied to
a particular case. Secondly, the full history of even a comparatively
uncomplicated case would take a whole book to recount. Inevitably, the
story of Henry’s analysis suffers a little in compression. The references,
for instance, to the I Ching have been somewhat obscured and lent an
unnatural (and to me unsatisfactory) flavor of the occult by being pre-
sented out of their full context. Nevertheless, we concluded — and I am
sure the reader will agree — that, with the warnings duly given, the
clarity, to say nothing of the human interest, of Henry’s analysis
greatly enriches this book.

I began by describing how Jung came to write Man and his Symbols.
I end by reminding the reader of what a remarkable — perhaps unique
— publication this is. Carl Gustav Jung was one of the great doctors of
all time and one of the great thinkers of this century. His object always
was to help men and women to know themselves, so that by self-know-
ledge and thoughtful self-use they could lead full, rich, and happy lives.
At the very end of his own life, which was as full, rich, and happy as
any I have encountered, he decided to use the strength that was
left him to address his message to a wider public than he had ever
tried to reach before. He completed his task and his life in the same
month. This book is his legacy to the broad reading public.

Contents

Parti Approaching the unconscious 18

Carl G. Jung

Part 2 Ancient myths and modern man 104

Joseph L. Henderson

Part 3 The process of individuation 158

M.-L. von Franz

Part 4 Symbolism in the visual arts 230

Aniela Jaffe

Part 5 Symbols in an individual analysis 272

Jolande Jacobi

Conclusion: Science and the unconscious 304

M.-L. von Franz

Notes 31 1

Index 316

Illustration credits

319

1 Approaching the unconscious

Carl G. Jung

The entrance to the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Rameses III

Approaching the unconscious

The importance of dreams

Man uses the spoken or written word to express
the meaning of what he wants to convey. His
language is full of symbols, but he also often
employs signs or images that are not strictly
descriptive. Some are mere abbreviations or
strings of initials, such as UN, UNICEF, or
UNESCO ; others are familiar trade marks, the
names of patent medicines, badges, or insignia.
Although these are meaningless in themselves,
they have acquired a recognizable meaning
through common usage or deliberate intent.
Such things are not symbols. They are signs,
and they do no more than denote the objects
to which they are attached.

What we call a symbol is a term, a name, or
even a picture that may be familiar in daily
life, yet that possesses specific connotations in
addition to its conventional and obvious mean-
ing. It implies something vague, unknown, or
hidden from us. Many Cretan monuments, for
instance, are marked with the design of the

double adze. This is an object that we know,
but we do not know its symbolic implications.
For another example, take the case of the
Indian who, after a visit to England, told his
friends at home that the English worship ani-
mals, because he had found eagles, lions, and
oxen in old churches. He was not aware (nor
are many Christians) that these animals are
symbols of the Evangelists and are derived from
the vision of Ezekiel, and that this in turn has
an analogy to the Egyptian sun god Horus and
his four sons. There are, moreover, such objects
as the wheel and the cross that are known all
over the world, yet that have a symbolic signi-
ficance under certain conditions. Precisely what
they symbolize is still a matter for controversial
speculation.

Thus a word or an image is symbolic when- it
implies something more than its obvious and
immediate meaning. It has a wider "uncon-
scious” aspect that is never precisely defined or

fully explained. Nor can one hope to define or
explain it. As the mind explores the symbol, it
is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of
reason. The wheel may lead our thoughts to-
ward the concept of a “divine” sun, but at this
point reason must admit its incompetence; man
is unable to define a “divine” being. When,
with all our intellectual limitations, we call
something “divine,” we have merely given it a
name, which may be based on a creed, but
never on factual evidence.

Because there are innumerable things beyond
the range of human understanding, we con-
stantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts
that we cannot define or fully comprehend.
This is one reason why all religions employ sym-
bolic language or images. But this conscious use
of symbols is only one aspect of a psychological
fact of great importance: Man also produces
symbols unconsciously and spontaneously, in
the form of dreams.

It is not easy to grasp this point. But the
point must be grasped if we are to know more
about the ways in which the human mind
works. Man, as we realize if we reflect for a
moment, never perceives anything fully or com-
prehendsanythingcompletely. Hecansee, hear,
touch, and taste; but how far he sees, how well
he hears, what his touch tells him, and what he
tastes depend upon the number and quality of
his senses. These limit his perception of the
world around him. By using scientific instru-
ments he can partly compensate for the defici-
encies of his senses. For example, he can extend
the range of his vision by binoculars or of his
hearing by electrical amplification. But the most
elaborate apparatus cannot do more than bring
distant or small objects within range of his eyes,
or make faint sounds more audible. No matter
what instruments he uses, at some point he
reaches the edge of certainty beyond which con-
scious knowledge cannot pass.

Left, three of the four Evangelists
(in a relief on Chartres Cathedral)
appear as animals: The lion is Mark,
the ox Luke, the eagle John. Also
animals are three of the sons of the
Egyptian god Horus (above, c 1 250
b c ). Animals, and groups of four,
are universal religious symbols.

21

In many societies, representations
of the sun express man's indefinable
religious experience. Above, a
decoration on the back of a throne
belonging to the 1 4th-century b.c.
Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen is
dominated by a sun disk; the hands
at the end of the rays symbolize
the sun’s life-giving power. Left,
a monk in 20th-century Japan prays
before a mirror that represents the
divine Sun in the Shinto religion.

Right, tungsten atoms seen with a
microscope that magnifies 2,000,000
times. Far right, the spots in center
of picture are the farthest visible
galaxies. No matter how far man
extends his senses, limits to his
conscious perception remain.

There are, moreover, unconscious aspects of
our perception of reality. The first is the fact
that even when our senses react to real pheno-
mena, sights, and sounds, they are somehow
translated from the realm of reality into that
of the mind. Within the mind they become
psychic events, whose ultimate nature is un-
knowable (for the psyche cannot know its own
psychical substance). Thus every experience
contains an indefinite number of unknown fac-
tors, not to speak of the fact that every concrete
object is always unknown in certain respects,
because we cannot know the ultimate nature of
matter itself.

Then there are certain events of which we
have not consciously taken note; they have re-
mained, so to speak, below the threshold of con-
sciousness. They have happened, but they have
been absorbed subliminally, without our con-
scious knowledge. We can become aware of
such happenings only in a moment of intuition
or by a process of profound thought that leads
to a later realization that they must have hap-
pened; and though we may have originally
ignored their emotional and vital importance, it
later wells up from the unconscious as a sort
of afterthought.

It may appear, for instance, in the form of a
dream. As a general rule, the unconscious
aspect of any event is revealed to us in dreams,

where it appears not as a rational thought but
as a symbolic image. As a matter of history, it
was the study of dreams that first enabled
psychologists to investigate the unconscious
aspect of conscious psychic events.

It is on such evidence that psychologists
assume the existence of an unconscious psyche

— though many scientists and philosophers deny
its existence. They argue naively that such an
assumption implies the existence of two “sub-
jects,” or (to put it in a common phrase) two
personalities within the same individual. But
this is exactly what it does imply quite cor-
rectly. And it is one of the curses of modern
man that many people suffer from this divided
personality. It is by no means a pathological
symptom; it is a normal fact that can be ob-
served at any time and everywhere. It is not
merely the neurotic whose right hand does not
know what the left hand is doing. This predica-
ment is a symptom of a general unconsciousness
that is the undeniable common inheritance of
all mankind.

Man has developed consciousness slowly and
laboriously, in a process that took untold ages to
reach the civilized state (which is arbitrarily
dated from the invention of script in about
4000 b.g. ) . And this evolution is far from com-
plete, for large areas of the human mind are
still shrouded in darkness. What we call the
“psyche” is by no means identical with our
consciousness and its contents.

Whoever denies the existence of the uncon-
scious is in fact assuming that our present know-
ledge of the psyche is total. And this belief is
clearly just as false as the assumption that we
know all there is to be known about the natural
universe. Our psyche is part of nature, and its
enigma is as limitless. Thus we cannot define
either the psyche or nature. We can merely
state what we believe them to be and describe,
as best we can, how they function. Quite apart,
therefore, from the evidence that medical
research has accumulated, there are strong
grounds of logic for rejecting statements like
“There is no unconscious.” Those who say such
things merely express an age-old “misoneism”

— a fear of the new and the unknown.

23

There are historical reasons for this resistance
to the idea of an unknown part of the human
psyche. Consciousness is a very recent acquisi-
tion of nature, and it is still in an “experimen-
tal” state. It is frail, menaced by specific dan-
gers, and easily injured. As anthropologists have
noted, one of the most common mental de-
rangements that occur among primitive people
is what they call “the loss of a soul” — which
means, as the name indicates, a noticeable dis-
ruption (or, more technically, a dissociation) of
consciousness.

Among such people, whose consciousness is
at a different level of development from ours,
the “soul” (or psyche) is not felt to be a unit.
Many primitives assume that a man has a
“bush soul” as well as his own, and that this
bush soul is incarnate in a wild animal or a tree,
with which the human individual has some kind
of psychic identity. This is what the distin-
guished French ethnologist Lucien Levy-Briihl
called a “mystical participation.” He later re-
tracted this term under pressure of adverse
criticism, but I believe that his critics were
wrong. It is a well-known psychological fact

that an individual may have such an uncon-
scious identity with some other person or object.

This identity takes a variety of forms among
primitives. If the bush soul is that of an animal,
the animal itself is considered as some sort of
brother to the man. A man whose brother is a
crocodile, for instance, is supposed to be safe
when swimming a crocodile-infested river. If
the bush soul is a tree, the tree is presumed to
have something like parental authority over the
individual concerned. In both cases an injury
to the bush soul is interpreted as an injury to
the man.

In some tribes, it is assumed that a man has
a number of souls; this belief expresses the feel-
ing of some primitive individuals that they each
consist of several linked but distinct units. This
means that the individual’s psyche is far from
being safely synthesized; on the contrary, it
threatens to fragment only too easily under the
onslaught of unchecked emotions.

While this situation is familiar to us from the
studies of anthropologists, it is not so irrelevant
to our own advanced civilization as it might
seem. We too can become dissociated and lose

"Dissociation" meansa splitting in
the psyche, causing a neurosis. A
famous fictional example of this
state is Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886) by the Scots author R. L.
Stevenson. In the story Jekyll's
"split” took the form of a physical
change, rather than (as in reality)
an inner, psychic state Left, Mr.
Hyde (from the 1 932 film of the
story) — Jekyll's "other half."

Primitive people call dissociation
"loss of a soul"; they believe that
a man has a "bush soul” as well as
his own Right, a Nyanga tribesman
of west central Africa wearing a mask
of the hornbill — the bird that he
identifies with his bush soul.

Far right, telephonists on a busy
switchboard handle many calls at
once. In such jobs people "split
off" parts of their conscious minds
to concentrate. But this split is
controlled and temporary, not a
spontaneous, abnormal dissociation

24

our identity. We can be possessed and altered
by moods, or become unreasonable and unable
to recall important facts about ourselves or
others, so that people ask: “What the devil has
got into you?” We talk about being able “to
control ourselves,” but self-control is a rare and
remarkable virtue. We may think we have our-
selves under control; yet a friend can easily tell
us things about ourselves of which we have no
knowledge.

Beyond doubt, even in what we call a high
level of civilization, human consciousness has
not yet achieved a reasonable degree of conti-
nuity. It is still vulnerable and liable to frag-
mentation. This capacity to isolate part of one's
mind, indeed, is a valuable characteristic. It
enables us to concentrate upon one thing at a
time, excluding everything else that may claim
our attention. But there is a world of difference
between a conscious decision to split off and
temporarily suppress a part of one's psyche, and
a condition in which this happens spontane-
ously, without one's knowledge or consent and
even against one's intention. The former is a
civilized achievement, the latter a primitive

“loss of a soul,” or even the pathological cause
of a neurosis.

Thus, even in our day the unity of con-
sciousness is still a doubtful affair; it can too
easily be disrupted. An ability to control one’s
emotions that may be very desirable from one
point of view would be a questionable accom-
plishment from another, for it would deprive
social intercourse of varietv, color, and warmth.

It is against this background that we must
review the importance ofdreams those flimsy,
evasive, unreliable, vague, and uncertain fan-
tasies. To explain my point of view, I should
like to describe how it developed over a period
of years, and how I was led to conclude that
dreams are the most frequent and universally
accessible source for the investigation of man’s
symbolizing faculty.

Sigmund Freud was the pioneer who first
tried to explore empirically the unconscious
background of consciousness. He worked on the
general assumption that dreams are not a matter
of' chance but are associated with conscious
thoughts and problems. This assumption was
not in the least arbitrary. It was based upon the

25

conclusion of eminent neurologists (for instance,
Pierre Janet) that neurotic symptoms are re-
lated to some conscious experience. They even
appear to be split-off areas of the conscious
mind, which, at another time and under differ-
ent conditions, can be conscious.

Before the beginning of this century, Freud
and Josef Breuer had recognized that neurotic
symptoms — hysteria, certain types of pain, and
abnormal behavior — are in fact symbolically
meaningful. They are one way in which the
unconscious mind expresses itself, just as it
may in dreams; and they are equally symbolic.
A patient, for instance, who is confronted with
an intolerable situation may develop a spasm
whenever he tries to swallow: He “can't swal-
low it.” Under similar conditions of psycholo-
gical stress, another patient has an attack of

asthma: He “can't breathe the atmosphere at
home.” A third suffers from a peculiar para-
lysis of the legs: He can't walk, i.e. “he can’t
go on any more.” A fourth, who vomits when
he eats, “cannot digest” some unpleasant fact.
I could cite many examples of this kind, but
such physical reactions are only one form in
which the problems that trouble us unconsci-
ously may express themselves. They more often
find expression in our dreams.

Any psychologist who has listened to num-
bers of people describing their dreams knows
that dream symbols have much greater variety
than the physical symptoms of neurosis. They
often consist of elaborate and picturesque fan-
tasies. But if the analyst who is confronted by
this dream material uses Freud’s original tech-
nique of “free association,” he finds that dreams

m*.

W

1 rvWf "

% *

|

ft.

l • • • •• . X.

• 9

1 Sigmund Freud (Vienna)

2 Otto Rank (Vienna)

3 Ludwig Binswanger (Kreuzlingen)

4 A A Brill

• ^ • • io #

5 Max Eitingon (Berlin)

6 James J. Putnam (Boston)

7 Ernest Jones (Toronto)

8 Wilhelm Stekel (Vienna)

8

9 Eugen Bleuler (Zurich)

10 Emma Jung (Kusnacht)

11 Sandor Ferenczi (Budapest)

12 C. G. Jung (Kusnacht)

can eventually be reduced to certain basic pat-
terns. This technique played an important part
in the development of psychoanalysis, for it
enabled Freud to use dreams as the starting
point from which the unconscious problem of
the patient might be explored.

Freud made the simple but penetrating obser-
vation that if a dreamer is encouraged to go on
talking about his dream images and the thoughts
that these prompt in his mind, he will give
himself away and reveal the unconscious back-
ground of his ailments, in both what he says
and what he deliberately omits saying. His ideas
may seem irrational and irrelevant, but after a
time it becomes relatively easy to see what it is
that he is trying to avoid, what unpleasant
thought or experience he is suppressing. No
matter how he tries to camouflage it, every-
thing he says points to the core of his predica-
ment. A doctor sees so many things from the
seamy side of life that he is seldom far from the
truth when he interprets the hints that his
patient produces as signs of an uneasy con-
science. What he eventually discovers, unfor-
tunately, confirms his expectations. Thus far,
nobody can say anything against Freud's theory
of repression and wish fulfillment as apparent
causes of dream symbolism.

Freud attached particular importance to
dreams as the point of departure for a process

of 'Tree association.” But after a time I began to
feel that this was a misleading and inadequate
use of the rich fantasies that the unconscious
produces in sleep. My doubts really began when
a colleague told me of an experience he had
during the course of a long train journey in
Russia. Though he did not know the language
and could not even decipher the Cyrillic script,
he found himself musing over the strange letters
in which the railway notices were written, and
he fell into a reverie in which he imagined all
sorts of meanings for them.

One idea led to another, and in his relaxed
mood he found that this “free association” had
stirred up many old memories. Among them
he was annoyed to find some long-buried dis-
agreeable topics things he had wished to for-
get and had forgotten consciously . He had in
fact arrived at what psychologists would call
his “complexes” — that is, repressed emotional
themes that can cause constant psychological
disturbances or even, in many cases, the symp-
toms of neurosis.

This episode opened my eyes to the fact that
it was not necessary to use a dream as the point
ofdeparture for the process of “free association”
if one wished to discover the complexes of a
patient. It showed me that one can reach the
center directly from any point of the compass.
One could begin from Cyrillic letters, from

Left, many of the great pioneers of
modern psychoanalysis, photo-
graphed at a Congress of
Psychoanalysis in 1 91 1 at Weimar,
Germany. The key, below left,
identifies some of the major figures.

Right, the ' inkblot'' test devised
by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann
Rorschach. The shape of the blot
can serve as a stimulus for free
association; in fact, almost any
irregular free shape can spark off
the associative process. Leonardo
da Vinci wrote in his Notebooks:
"It should not be hard for you to
stop sometimes and look into the
stains of walls, or ashes of a fire,
or clouds, or mud or like places,
in which . . . you may find really
marvelous ideas."

meditations upon a crystal ball, a prayer wheel,
or a modern painting, or even from casual con-
versation about some quite trivial event. The
dream was no more and no less useful in this
respect than any other possible starting point.
Nevertheless, dreams have a particular signifi-
cance, even though they often arise from an
emotional upset in which the habitual complexes
are also involved. (The habitual complexes are
the tender spots of the psyche, which react most
quickly to an external stimulus or disturbance.)
That is why free association can lead one from
any dream to the critical secret thoughts.

At this point, however, it occurred to me that
(if 1 was right so far) it might reasonably follow
that dreams have some special and more signi-
ficant function of their own. Very often dreams
have a definite, evidently purposeful structure,
indicating an underlying idea or intention
though, as a rule, the latter is not immediately
comprehensible. I therefore began to consider
whether one should pay more attention to the
actual form and content of a dream, rather than
allowing ‘“free' 1 association to lead one off
through a train of ideas to complexes that could
as easily be reached by other means.

This new thought was a turning point in the
development of my psychology. It meant that I
gradually gave up following associations that
led far away from the text of a dream. I chose
to concentrate rather on the associations to the
dream itself, believing that the latter expressed
something specific that the unconscious was
trying to say.

The change in my attitude toward dreams
involved a change of method; the* new tech-

Two different possible stimuli of
free association: the whirling
prayer wheel of a Tibetan beggar
(left), or a fortune teller’s crystal
ball (right, a modern crystal gazer
at a British fair).

nique was one that could take account of all
the various wider aspects of a dream. A story
told by the conscious mind has a beginning, a
development, and an end, but the same is not
true of' a dream. Its dimensions in time and
space are quite different; to understand it you
must examine it from every aspect —just as you
may take an unknown object in your hands and
turn it over and over until you are familiar
with every detail of its shape.

Perhaps I have now said enough to show how
1 came increasingly to disagree with “free”
association as Freud first employed it: I wanted
to keep as close as possible to the dream itself,
and to exclude all the irrelevant ideas and asso-
ciations that it might evoke. True, these could
lead one toward the complexes of a patient,
but I had a more far-reaching purpose in mind
than the discovery of complexes that cause
neurotic disturbances. There are many other
means by which these can be identified: The
psychologist, for instance, can get all the hints
he needs by using word-association tests (by ask-
ing the patient what he associates to a given
set of words, and by studying his responses).
But to know and understand the psychic life-

process of an individual's whole personality, it
is important to realize that his dreams and their
symbolic images have a much more important
role to play.

Almost everyone knows, for example, that
there is an enormous variety of images by which
the sexual act can be symbolized for, one might
say, represented in the form of an allegory).
Each of these images can lead, by a process of
association, to the idea of sexual intercourse and
to specific complexes that any individual may
have about his own sexual attitudes. But one
could just as well unearth such complexes by
day-dreaming on a set ofindecipherable Russian
letters. I was thus led to the assumption that a
dream can contain some message other than the
sexual allegory, and that it does so for definite
reasons. To illustrate this point:

A man may dream of inserting a key in a
lock, of wielding a heavy stick, or of breaking
down a door with a battering ram. Each of
these can be regarded as a sexual allegory. But
the fact that his unconscious for its own pur-
poses has chosen one of these specific images
it may be the key, the stick, or the battering
ram is also of major significance. The real
task is to understand why the key has been
preferred to the stick, or the stick to the ram.
And sometimes this might even lead one to dis-
cover that it is not the sexual act at all that is
represented, but some quite different psycholo-
gical point.

From this line of reasoning, I concluded that
only the material that is clearly and visibly part
of a dream should be used in interpreting it.
The dream has its own limitation. Its specific

One of the countless symbolic or
allegorical images of the sexual
act is a deer hunt: Right, a detail
from a painting by the 1 6 th-century
German artist Cranach The sexual
implication of the deer hunt is
underlined by a medieval English
folk song called "The Keeper" :

The first doe that he shot at he
missed.

And the second doe he trimmed he
kissed,

And the third ran away in a young
man s heart,

She's amongst the leaves of the
green 0.

form itself tells us what belongs to it and what
leads away from it. While “free" association
lures one away from that material in a kind of
zigzag line, the method I evolved is more like a
circumambulation whose center is the dream
picture. I work all around the dream picture
and disregard every attempt that the dreamer
makes to break away from it. Time and time
again, in my professional work, I have had to
repeat the words: “Let's get back to your
dream. What does the dream say?"

For instance, a patient of' mine dreamed of
a drunken and disheveled vulgar woman. In
the dream, it seemed that this woman was his
wife, though in real life his wife was totally
difl'erent. On the surface, therefore, the dream
was shockingly untrue, and the patient imme-
diately rejected it as dream nonsense. If I, as his
doctor, had let him start a process of associa-
tion, he would inevitably have tried to get as far
away as possible from the unpleasant suggestion
of his dream. In that case, he would have ended
with one of* his staple complexes a complex,
possibly, that had nothing to do with his wife
and we should have learned nothing about the
spec ial meaning of* this partic ular dream.

A key in a lock may be a sexual
symbol — but not invariably. Left,
a section of an altarpiece by the
15th-century Flemish artist Campm.
The door was intended to symbolize
hope, the lock to symbolize charity,
and the key to symbolize the desire
for God. Below, a British bishop
during the consecration of a church
carries out a traditional ceremony
by knocking on the church door with
a staff — which is obviously not a
phallic symbol but a symbol of
authority and the shepherd's crook.
No individual symbolic image can be
said to have a dogmatically fixed,
generalized meaning.

The "amma" is the female element
in the male unconscious. (It and the
"animus" in the female unconscious
are discussed in Chapter 3.) This
inner duality is often symbolized
by a hermaphroditic figure, like
the crowned hermaphrodite, above
right, from a 1 7th-century alchemical
manuscript. Right, a physical image
of man's psychic "bisexuality": a
human cell with its chromosomes.

All organisms have two sets of
chromosomes — one from each parent

30

What, then, was his unconscious trying to
convey by such an obviously untrue statement?
Clearly, it somehow expressed the idea of a
degenerate female who was closely connected
with the dreamer’s life; but since the projection
of this image on to his wife was unjustified and
factually untrue, I had to look elsewhere
before I found out what this repulsive image
represented.

In the Middle Ages, long before the physio-
logists demonstrated that by reason of our
glandular structure there are both male and

female elements in all of us, it was said that
‘'every man carries a woman within himself.’'
It is this female element in every male that I
have called the “anima.” This “feminine”
aspect is essentially a certain inferior kind of
rclatedness to the surroundings, and particu-
larly to women, which is kept carefully con-
cealed from others as well as from oneself.
In other words, though an individual’s visible
personality may seem quite normal, he may
well be concealing from others — or even from
himself— the deplorable condition of “the
woman within.”

That was the case with this particular
patient: His female side was not nice. His
dream was actually saying to him : “You are in
some respects behaving like a degenerate
female,” and thus gave him an appropriate
shock. (An example of this kind, of course, must
not be taken as evidence that the unconscious
is concerned with “moral” injunctions. The
dream was not telling the patient to “behave
better,” but was simply trying to balance the
lopsided nature of his conscious mind, which
was maintaining the fiction that he was a
perfect gentleman throughout.)

It is easy to understand why dreamers tend
to ignore and even deny the message of their
dreams. Consciousness naturally resists any-
thing unconscious and unknown. I have already
pointed out the existence among primitive
peoples of what anthropologists call “miso-
neism,” a deep and superstitious fear of novelty.
The primitives manifest all the reactions of the
wild animal against untoward events. But
“civilized” man reacts to new ideas in much
the same way, erecting psychological barriers to
protect himself from the shock of facing some-
thing new. This can easily be observed in any
individual's reaction to his own dreams when
obliged to admit a surprising thought. Many
pioneers in philosophy, science, and even litera-
ture have been victims of the innate conserv-
atism of their contemporaries. Psychology is
one of the youngest of the sciences; because it
attempts to deal with the working of the uncon-
scious, it has inevitably encountered misoneism
in an extreme form.

3 ^

Past and future in the unconscious

So far, I have been sketching some of the prin-
ciples on which I approached the problem of
dreams, for when we want to investigate man's
faculty to produce symbols, dreams prove to be
the most basic and accessible material for this
purpose. The two fundamental points in deal-
ing with dreams are these: First, the dream
should be treated as a fact, about which one
must make no previous assumption except that
it somehow makes sense ; and second, the dream
is a specific expression of the unconscious.

One could scarcely put these principles more
modestly. No matter how low anyone's opinion
of the unconscious may be, he must concede
that it is worth investigating; the unconscious
is at least on a level with the louse, which, after
all, enjoys the honest interest of the entomolo-
gist. If somebody with little experience and
knowledge of dreams thinks that dreams are
just chaotic occurrences without meaning, he
is at liberty to do so. But if one assumes that
they are normal events (which, as a matter of
fact, they are), one is bound to consider that
they are either causal i.e. that there is a
rational cause for their existence or in a cer-
tain way purposive, or both.

Let us now look a little more closely at the
ways in which the conscious and unconscious

contents of the mind are linked together. Take
an example with which everyone is familiar.
Suddenly you find you cannot remember what
you were going to say next, though a moment
ago the thought was perfectly clear. Or perhaps
you were about to introduce a friend, and his
name escaped you as you were about to utter it.
You say you cannot remember; in fact, though,
the thought has become unconscious, or at
least momentarily separated from conscious-
ness. We find the same phenomenon with our
senses. ir we listen to a continuous note on the
fringe of audibility, the sound seems to stop
at regular intervals and then start again. Such
oscillations are due to a periodic decrease and
increase in one's attention, not to any change
in the note.

But when something slips out of our con-
sciousness it does not cease to exist, any more
than a car that has disappeared round a corner
has vanished into thin air. It is simply out of
sight. Just as we may later see the car again,
so we come across thoughts that were tem-
porarily lost to us.

Thus, part of the unconscious consists ol a
multitude of temporarily obscured thoughts,
impressions, and images that, in spite of being
lost, continue to influence our conscious minds.

A man who is distracted or “absent-minded"
will walk across the room to letch something.
He stops, seemingly perplexed ; he has forgotten
what he was after. His hands grope about
among the objects on the table as if he were
sleepwalking; he is oblivious of his original
purpose, yet he is unconsciously guided by it.
Then he realizes what it is that he wants. His
unconscious has prompted him.

If you observe the behavior of a neurotic
person, you can see him doing many things
that he appears to be doing consciously and
purposefully. Yet if you ask him about them,
you will discover that he is either unconscious
of them or has something quite different in
mind. He hears and does not hear; he sees,
yet is blind; he knows and is ignorant. Such
examples are so common that the specialist soon
realizes that unconscious contents of the mind
behave as if they were conscious and that you
can never be sure, in such cases, whether
thought, speech, or action is conscious or not.

It is this kind of behavior that makes so
many physicians dismiss statements by hysteri-
cal patients as utter lies. Such persons certainly
produce more untruths than most of us. but
“lie'' is scarcely the right word to use. In fact,
their mental state causes an uncertainty of

behavior because their consciousness is liable
to unpredictable eclipse by an interference from
the unconscious. Even their skin sensations may
reveal similar fluctuations of awareness. At one
moment the hysterical person may feel a needle
prick in the arm; at the next it may pass unno-
ticed. If his attention can be focused on a cer-
tain point, the whole of his body can be
completely anesthetized until the tension that
causes this blackout of the senses has been re-
laxed. Sense perception is then immediately
restored. All the time, however, he has been
unconsciously aware of what was happening.

The physician can see this process quite
clearly when he hypnotizes such a patient. It
is easy to demonstrate that the patient has been
aware of every detail. The prick in the arm or
the remark made during an eclipse of con-
sciousness can be recalled as accurately as if
there had been no anesthesia or ‘'forgetful ness."

I recall a woman who w as once admitted to the
clinic in a state of complete stupor. When she
recovered consciousness next day, she knew w ho
she was but did not know where she was, how
or why she had come there, or even the date.
Yet alter I had hypnotized her. she told me why
she had fallen ill. how she had got to the clinic,
and who had admitted her. All these details

"Misoneism, " an unreasoning fear
and hatred of new ideas, was a major
block to public acceptance of modern
psychology It also opposed Darwin s
theories of evolution — as when an
American schoolteacher named
Scopes was tried in 1 925 for teaching
evolution Far left, at the trial, the
lawyer Clarence Darrow defending
Scopes; center left, Scopes himself.
Equally anti- Darwin is the cartoon,
left, from an 1 861 issue of Britain's
magazine Punch Right, a light-
hearted look at misoneism by the
American humorist James Thurber,
whose aunt (he wrote) was afraid
that electricity was "leaking all
over the place."

/

/

33

could he verified. She was even able to ted 1 the
time at which she had hern admitted, because
she had seen a clock in the entrance hall. Under
hypnosis, her memory was as clear as if she
had been completely conscious all the time.

When we discuss such matters, we usually
have to draw on evidence supplied by clinical
observation. For this reason, many critics
assume that the unconscious and all its subtle
manifestations belong solely to the sphere of
psychopathology. They consider any expression
of the unconscious as something neurotic or
psychotic, which has nothing to do with a nor-
mal mental state. But neurotic phenomena are
by no means the products exclusively ol disease.
They are in fact no more than pathological
exaggerations of normal occurrences; it is only
because they are exaggerations that they an*
more obvious than their normal counterparts.
Hysterical symptoms can be observed in all
normal persons, but they are so slight that they
usually pass unnoticed.

Forgetting, for instance, is a normal process,
in which certain conscious ideas lose their speci-
fic energy because one’s attention has been
deflected. When interest turns elsewhere, it
leaves in shadow the things with which one was
previously concerned, just as a searchlight lights
u]) a new area by leaving another in dark-
ness. This is unavoidable, for consciousness c an
keep only a lew images in full clarity at one
time, and even this c larity fluc tuates.

But the forgotten ideas have not ceased to
exist. Although they cannot be reproduced at
will, they are present in a subliminal state just
beyond the threshold of recall from which
they can rise 4 again spontaneously at any time,
often after many years of apparently total
oblivion.

I am speaking here of things we have con-
sciously seen or heard, and subsequently forgot-
ten. But we all see, hear, smell, and taste many
things without noticing them at the time, either
because our attention is deflected or because
the stimulus to our senses is too slight to leave
a consc ious impression. The unconscious, how-
ever, has take'n note of them, and sue h sublimi-
nal sense perceptions play a significant part in
our everyday fixes. Without our realizing it,
they influence* the way in which we react to
both events and people.

An example of this that 1 found particularly
revealing was provided by a professor who had
been walking in the country with one of his
pupils, absorbed in serious conversation. Sud-
denly he noticed that his thoughts were being
interrupted by an unexpected flow of memories
from his early childhood. He could not account
for this distraction. Nothing in what had been
said seemed to have any connection with these
memories. On looking back, he* saw that he had
bet'll walking past a farm when the* first of these
childhood recollections had surged up in his
mind. He* suggested to his pupil that tlicx

In cases of extreme mass hysteria
(which was in the past called
"possession”), the conscious mind
and ordinary sense perception seem
eclipsed. Left, the frenzy of a Balinese
sword dance causes the dancers to
fall into trances and, sometimes,
to turn their weapons against
themselves. Right, rock and roll
music in its heyday seemed to
induce an almost comparable
trance-like excitement.

should walk back to the point where the fan-
tasies had begun. Once there, he noticed the
smell of geese, and instantly he realized that it
was this smell that had touched ofF the flow of
memories.

In his youth he had lived on a farm where
geese were kept, and their characteristic smell
had left a lasting though forgotten impression.
As he passed the farm on his walk, he had
noticed the smell subliminally, and this uncon-
scious perception had called back long-forgot-
ten experiences of his childhood. The perception
was subliminal, because the attention was en-
gaged elsewhere, and the stimulus was not
strong enough to deflect it and to reach con-
sciousness directly. Yet it had brought up the
“forgotten" memories.

Such a “cue" or “trigger" effect can explain
the onset of neurotic symptoms as well as more
benign memories when a sight, smell, or sound
recalls a circumstance in the past. A girl, for
instance, may be busy in her office, apparently
in good health and spirits. A moment later she
develops a blinding headache and shows other
signs of distress. Without consciously noticing

it, she has heard the foghorn of a distant ship,
and this has unconsciously reminded her of an
unhappy parting with a lover whom she has
been doing her best to forget.

Aside from normal forgetting, Freud has
described several cases that involve the “for-
getting" of disagreeable memories — memories
that one is only too ready to lose. As Nietzsche
remarked, where pride is insistent enough,
memory prefers to give way. Thus, among the
lost memories, we encounter not a few that owe
their subliminal state (and their incapacity to
be voluntarily reproduced) to their disagreeable
and incompatible nature. The psychologist calls
these repressed contents.

A case in point might be that of a secretary
who is jealous of' one of her employer’s associ-
ates. She habitually forgets to invite this person
to meetings, though the name is clearly marked
on the list she is using. But, if challenged on the
point, she simply says she “forgot" or was
“interrupted." She never admits not even to
herself' the real reason for her omission.

Many people mistakenly overestimate^ the
role of willpower and think that nothing can

The toy cars forming the Volkswagen
trade-mark in this advertisement
may have a "trigger " effect on a
reader's mind, stirring unconscious
memories of childhood. If these
memories are pleasant, the pleasure
may be associated (unconsciously)
with the product and brand name.

36

happen to their minds that they do not decide
and intend. But one must learn to discriminate
carefully between intentional and unintentional
contents of the mind. The former are derived
from the ego personality; the latter, however,
arise from a source that is not identical with the
ego, but is its “other side.” It is this “other side”
that would have made the secretary forget the
invitations.

There are many reasons why we forget things
that we have noticed or experienced ; and there
are just as many ways in which they may be
recalled to mind. An interesting example is that
of cryptomnesia, or “concealed recollection.”
An author may be writing steadily to a precon-
ceived plan, working out an argument or de-
veloping the line of a story, when he suddenly
runs off at a tangent. Perhaps a fresh idea has
occurred to him, or a different image, or a
whole new sub-plot. If you ask him what
prompted the digression, he will not be able to
tell you. He may not even have noticed the
change, though he has now produced material
that is entirely fresh and apparently unknown
to him before. Yet it can sometimes be shown
convincingly that what he has written bears a
striking similarity to the work of another author
—a work that he believes he has never seen.

I myself found a fascinating example of this
in Nietzsche’s book Thus Spake Z arathustra ,
where the author reproduces almost word for
word an incident reported in a ship’s log for
the year 1686. By sheer chance I had read this
seaman’s yarn in a book published about 1835
(half a century before Nietzsche wrote); and
when I found the similar passage in Thus Spake
Z arathustra , I was struck by its peculiar style,
which was different from Nietzsche’s usual
language. I was convinced that Nietzsche must
also have seen the old book, though he made
no reference to it. I wrote to his sister, who was
still alive, and she confirmed that she and her
brother had in fact read the book together
when he was 1 1 years old. I think, from the
context, it is inconceivable that Nietzsche had
any idea that he was plagiarizing this story. I
believe that fifty years later it had unexpectedly
slipped into focus in his conscious mind.

In this type of case there is genuine, if unre-
alized, recollection. Much the same sort of thing
may happen to a musician who has heard a
peasant tune or popular song in childhood and
finds it cropping up as the theme of a sym-
phonic movement that he is composing in adult
life. An idea or an image has moved back from
the unconscious into the conscious mind.

What I have so far said about the uncon-
scious is no more than a cursory sketch of the
nature and functioning of this complex part of
the human psyche. But it should have indicated
the kind of subliminal material from which the
symbols of our dreams may be spontaneously
produced. This subliminal material can consist
of all urges, impulses, and intentions: all per-
ceptions and intuitions; all rational or irrational
thoughts, conclusions, inductions, deductions,
and premises; and all varieties of feeling. Any
or all of these can take the form of partial,
temporary, or constant unconsciousness.

Such material has mostly become uncon-
scious because— in a manner of speaking —
there is no room for it in the conscious mind.
Some of one’s thoughts lose their emotional
energy and become subliminal (that is to say,
they no longer receive so much of our conscious
attention) because they have come to seem un-
interesting or irrelevant, or because there is
some reason why we wish to push them out of
sight.

It is, in fact, normal and necessary for us to
“forget” in this fashion, in order to make room
in our conscious minds for new impressions and
ideas. If this did not happen, everything we
experienced would remain above the threshold
of consciousness and our minds would become
impossibly cluttered. This phenomenon is so
widely recognized today that most people who
know anything about psychology take it for
granted.

But just as conscious contents can vanish
into the unconscious, new contents, which have
never yet been conscious, can arise from it.
One may have an inkling, for instance, that
something is on the point of breaking into con-
sciousness — that “something is in the air,” or
that one “smells a rat.” The discovery that the

37

unconscious is no mere depository of’ the past,
but is also lull of germs of future psychic situa-
tions and ideas, led me to my own new
approach to psychology. A great deal ol contro-
versial discussion has arisen around this point.
But it is a fact that, in addition to memories
from a long-distant conscious past, completely
new thoughts and creative ideas can also pre-
sent themselves from the unconscious thoughts
and ideas that have never been conscious before'.
’They grow up from the dark depths of the
mind like a lotus and form a most important
part ol the subliminal psyche.

We find this in everyday life, where dilemmas
are sometimes solved by tin* most surprising new
propositions; many artists, philosophers, and
even scientists owe some* of their best ideas to
inspirations that appear suddenly from the
unconscious. The ability to reach a rich vein
of such material and to translate it effectively
into philosophv, literature, music', or sc ientific
discovery is one* of the hallmarks of what is
commonly called genius.

We can find clear proof of this fact in the
history ofscience itself'. For example, the French

mathematician Poincare and the chemist
Kekule owed important scientific discoveries fas
they themselves admit « to sudden pictorial “re-
velations” from the* unconscious. The so-called
“mystical” experienceofthe French philosopher
Descartes involved a similar sudden revelation
in which he' saw in a flash the “o rd.gr of all
sciences.” 'Flic British author Robert Louis
Stevenson had spent years looking for a story
that would fit his “strong sense of man's double
being,” when the plot of Dr. Jelyll and Mr.
Hyde was sudde nly revealed to him in a dre am.

Late r I shall describe in more* detail how such
material arises from the* unconscious, and I shall
examine the form in whic h it is expressed. At
the* moment I simply want to point out that the
c apacity of the human psyche to produce suc h
new material is partic ularly significant when
one* is dealing with dream symbolism, for I
have found again and again in my professional
work that the image's and ideas that dreams
contain cannot possiblv In* explained solely in
terms of memorv. They e xpress new thoughts
that have' newer yet reached the threshold ol
consciousness.

)t£ 4roMlMflw *ab»«aai—

i«hlon«D( Kelt* (waaa sjmmrtn*>k+n Rib*), die boHj aceb* IWm
V rrw Bsdu ebaftoiaheitea ^aibAli

r-'T.

geaobloMtae Kett*

Wbbb Aatiehl Ob«r die Coaatitatioa der aua aeeha Kohlenatoiala-
nea bealebeadee, ge^ehlosaeaea KeUe wird rielleiehl aoch dentliefcar
witdergegtbea dureh folgeede graphiaeh* Foraiel, ia weleber die Koblea
•loffafoate raad aad die eier VerwaodUehafteeiebeitea jedee Au>»«*
dareb *ier voa ibn aaalaufeade Liaiea dargeeteilt aiad:

nffeae Kette.

© <■)

▼oa dieaer geaebloeaeaea Kette leitea aieb oun, vie gieieb
auafohrlieher geteigt werdea wird, alle die Verhindangen ab , die aiaa
gewobnlieh ala arootalieche Subataaarn beseiehaet f>ie offeae Ketle
eielleiebl iai ChiaoD, ini Chloranil uad deo weaigea Korpera aata-
Behiaea. die u beiden ia nlberer Betirhung atehen. Aueb dieae Korper
kOooen iadeaa auf die geaehloaaeoe Ketle bexogen aad von ibr abgeleitel
warden, wie die* apAler anch emrtert werdea anil.

11M In alien aromnliaehen Verbiadungen kann alan, alt gemeiaaebaft-

lieber Kera, eiae ana aeeba Kohlenaloffatomea beatebeade. geaebloaaeae
Ke<le angenommen werden, die noeh aeeba freie Verwandtaebaflaeiabei
lea besiltl. Man konnle aie doreb die Kormel : 0 # A, aaadhleben . ia
weleber A eiae aieht geeAtligte Afflnii*) aider VerwandlaehaAaeinbeii be-
aeiebael.

The 1 9th-century German chemist
Kekule, researching into the
molecular structure of benzene,
dreamed of a snake with its tail
in its mouth. (This is an age-old
symbol: left, a representation of
it from a third century b.c Greek
manuscript.) He interpreted the
dream to mean that the structure
was a closed carbon ring as on the
page, far left, from his Textbook
of Organic Chemistry ( 1 861 ) .

Right, an ordinary European highway
with a familiar sign that means
"look out for animals crossing "

But the motorists (their shadows
appear in the foreground as they
leave their car) see an elephant, a
rhinoceros, even a dinosaur. This
painting of a dream (by the modern
Swiss artist Erhard Jacoby)
accurately depicts the apparently
illogical, incoherent nature of
dream imagery.

38

The function of dreams

I have gone into some detail about the origins
of our dream life, because it is the soil from
which most symbols originally grow. Unfor-
tunately, dreams are difficult to understand. As
I have already pointed out, a dream is quite
unlike a story told by the conscious mind. In
everyday life one thinks out what one wants to
say, selects the most telling way of saying it, and
tries to make one's remarks logically coherent.
For instance, an educated person will seek to
avoid a mixed metaphor because it may give a
muddled impression of his point. But dreams
have a different texture. Images that seem con-
tradictory and ridiculous crowd in on the
dreamer, the normal sense of time is lost, and
commonplace things can assume a fascinating
or threatening aspect.

It may seem strange that the unconscious
mind should order its material so differently
from the seemingly disciplined pattern that we

can impose on our thoughts in waking life. Yet
anyone who stops for a moment to recall a
dream will be aware of this contrast, which is
in fact one of the main reasons why the ordinary
person finds dreams so hard to understand.
They do not make sense in terms of his normal
waking experience, and therefore he is inclined
either to disregard them or to confess that they
baffle him.

Perhaps it may be easier to understand this
point if we first realize the fact that the ideas
with which we deal in our apparently disci-
plined waking life are by no means as precise
as we like to believe. On the contrary, their
meaning (and their emotional significance for
us) becomes more imprecise the more closely
we examine them. The reason for this is that
anything we have heard or experienced can
become subliminal that is to say, can pass into
the unconscious. And even what we retain in

39

our conscious mind and can reproduce at will
has acquired an unconscious undertone that
will color the idea each time it is recalled. Our
conscious impressions, in fact, quickly assume
an element of unconscious meaning that is
psychically significant for us, though we are not
consciously aware of the existence of this sub-
liminal meaning or of the way in which it both
extends and confuses the conventional meaning.

Of course, such psychic undertones differ
from one person to another. Each of us receives
any abstract or general notion in the context of
the individual mind, and we therefore under-
stand and apply it in our individual ways.
When, in conversation, I use any such terms as
‘‘state,” “money,” “health,” or “society,” I
assume that my listeners understand more or
less the same thing as I do. But the phrase “more
or less” makes my point. Each word means
something slightly different to each person, even
among those who share the same cultural back-
ground. The reason for this variation is that a
general notion is received into an individual
context and is therefore understood and applied
in a slightly individual way. And the difference
of meaning is naturally greatest when people
have widely different social, political, religious
or psychological experiences.

As long as concepts are identical with mere
words, the variation is almost imperceptible and
plays no practical role. But when an exact defi-
nition or a careful explanation is needed, one
can occasionally discover the most amazing
variations, not only in the purely intellectual
understanding of the term, but particularly in
its emotional tone and its application. As a rule,
these variations are subliminal and therefore
never realized. v

One may tend to dismiss such differences as
redundant or expendable nuances of meaning
that have little relevance to everyday needs. But
the fact that they exist shows that even the most
matter-of-fact contents of consciousness have a
penumbra of uncertainty around them. Even
the most carefully defined philosophical or
mathematical concept, which we are sure does
not contain more than we have put into it, is
nevertheless more than we assume. It is a

psychic event and as such partly unknowable.
The very numbers you use in counting are more
than you take them to be. They are at the same
time mythological elements (for the Pytha-
goreans, they were even divine) ; but you are
certainly unaware of this when you use numbers
lor a practical purpose.

Every concept in our conscious mind, in
short, has its own psychic associations. While
such associations may vary in intensity (accord-
ing to the relative importance of the concept to
our whole personality, or according to the other
ideas and even complexes to which it is asso-
ciated in our unconscious), they are capable of

40

Vi

Le temps n'a point de rive. 1 930-39. Oil on canvas, 39 §" x 32". Collection „ The Museum of Modern Art New York

On these pages, further examples
of the irrational, fantastic nature
of dreams. Above left, owls and
bats swarm over a dreaming man
in an etching by the 1 8th-century
Spanish artist Goya.

Dragons or similar monsters are
common dream images. Left, a dragon,
pursues a dreamer in a woodcut
from The Dream of Poiiphilo, a
fantasy written by a 1 5th -century
Italian monk, Francesco Colonna.

Above, a painting entitled Time is
a River without Banks by the modern
artist Marc Chagall. The unexpected
association of these images— fish,
violin, clock, lovers — has all the
strangeness of a dream

4i

The mythological aspect of ordinary
numbers appears in Mayan reliefs
(top of page, c a.d. 730), which
personify numerical divisions of
time as gods. The pyramid of dots,
above, represents the tetraktys of
Greek Pythagorean philosophy (sixth
century B c ). It includes four numbers
1 , 2. 3, 4 making a total of 1 0.
Both four and 1 0 were worshiped
as divinities by the Pythagoreans.

42

changing the “normal'' character o! that con-
cept. It may even become something quite
different as it drills below the level of con-
sciousness.

These subliminal aspects of everything that
happens to us may seem to play very little part
in our daily lives. But in dream analysis, when*
the psychologist is dealing with expressions of
the unconscious, they are very releva ill. for they
are the almost invisible roots of our const ions
thoughts. That is why commonplace objects or
ideas can assume such powerful psychic signifi-
cance in a dream that we may awake seriously
disturbed, in spite of having dreamed ofnothing
worst* than a locked room or a missed train.

The images produced in dreams are much
more picturesque and vivid than the concepts
and experiences that are their waking counter-
parts. Out* of the reasons for this is that, in a
dream, such concepts can express their uncon-
scious meaning. In our conscious thoughts, we
restrain ourselves within the limits ol rational
st at erne'll ts statements that arc much less color-
ful because we have* stripped them of most of
their psychic assoc iations.

I recall one dream of my own that I found
cli flii'ii 1 1 to interpret. In this dream, a certain
man was trying to get be hind me and jump on
my back. I knew nothing of this man except
that I was aware that he had somehow picked
up a remark I had made and had twisted it into
a grotesque travesty of my meaning. But 1

could not see the connection between this fact
and his attempt in the dream to jump on me.
In my professional life, however, it has often
happened that someone has misrepresented
what I have said so often that I have scarcely
bothered to wonder whether this kind of mis-
representation makes me angry. Now there is a
certain value* in keeping a conscious control
over one's emotional reactions ; and this. I soon
realized, was the* point the* dream had made. It
had taken an Austrian colloquialism and trans-
lated it into a pictorial image*. This phrase,
common emougli in ordinary speech, is Du
kannsf mir auf den Buck el \ (eigen (You can
climb on my back), which means “I don't care
w hat you say about me." An American equiva-
lent, which could easily appear in a similar
dream, would be “Go jump in the lake."

One* could say that this dream picture was
symbolic, for it did not state* the* situation
directly but e*xpre*sse*d the* point indirectly by
means of a metaphor that I could not at first
unde rstand. When this happens as it so ofte n
doe s it is not deliberate “disguise " by a dream;
it simply reflects the* deficiencies in our under-
standing of emotionally charged pie* tori a I langu-
age*. For in our daily experience we* ne*c*d to
state* things as accurately as possible*, and we*
have learned to discard the* trimmings of'
fantasy both in our language* and in our
thoughts thus losing a quality that is still
characteristic of the primitive mind. Most of us

Not only numbers but such familiar
objects as stones and trees can
have symbolic importance for many
people. Left, rough stones placed
on the roadside by travelers in
India represent the (ingam, the
Hindu phallic symbol of creativity.
Right, a tree in West Africa that
the tribesmen call a "ju -jo” or
spirit tree, and to which they
ascribe magical power.

44

have consigned to the unconscious all the fan-
tastic psychic associations that every object or
idea possesses. The primitive, on the other hand,
is still aware of these psychic properties; he
endows animals, plants, or stones with powers
that we find strange and unacceptable.

An African jungle dweller, for instance, sees
a nocturnal creature by daylight and knows it
to be a medicine man who has temporarily
taken its shape. Or he may regard it as the bush
soul or ancestral spirit of one of his tribe. A
tree may play a vital part in the life of a primi-
tive, apparently possessing for him its own soul
and voice, and the man concerned will feel that
he shares its fate. There are some Indians in
South America who will assure you that they
are Red Arara parrots, though they are well
aware that they lack feathers, wings, and beaks.
For in the primitive’s world things do not have
the same sharp boundaries they do in our
“rational” societies.

What psychologists call psychic identity, or
“mystical participation,” has been stripped off'
our world of things. But it is exactly this halo
of unconscious associations that gives a colorful
and fantastic aspect to the primitive’s world.
We have lost it to such a degree that we do not
recognize it when we meet it again. With us
such things are kept below the threshold ; w r hen
they occasionally reappear, we even insist that
something is wrong.

I have more than once been consulted by
well-educated and intelligent people who have
had peculiar dreams, fantasies, or even visions,
which have shocked them deeply. They have

Left, a witch doctor from

Cameroon wearing a lion mask. V

He isn't pretending to be a lion;
he is convinced that he is a lion.

Like the Nyanga tribesman and his
bird mask (p. 25), he shares a
"psychic identity'' with the animal —
an identity that exists in the realm
of myth and symbolism. Modern
"rational" man has tried to cut
himself off from such psychic
associations (which nevertheless
survive in the unconscious) ; to
him, a spade is a spade and a lion
is only what the dictionary (right)
says it is.

assumed that no one who is in a sound state of
mind could suffer from such things, and that
anyone who actually sees a vision must be
pathologically disturbed. A theologian once told
me that Ezekiel’s visions were nothing more
than morbid symptoms, and that, when Moses
and other prophets heard “voices” speaking to
them, they were suffering from hallucinations.
You can imagine the panic he felt when some-
thing of this kind “spontaneously” happened to
him. We are so accustomed to the apparently
rational nature of our world that we can
scarcely imagine anything happening that can-
not be explained by common sense. The primi-
tive man confronted by a shock of this kind
would not doubt his sanity; he would think of
fetishes, spirits, or gods.

Yet the emotions that affect us are just the
same. In fact, the terrors that stem from our
elaborate civilization may be far more threaten-
ing than those that primitive people attribute
to demons. The attitude of modern civilized
man sometimes reminds me of a psychotic
patient in my clinic who was himself a doctor.
One morning I asked him how he was. He
replied that he had had a wonderful night dis-
infecting the whole of heaven with mercuric
chloride, but that in the course of this thorough-
going sanitary process he had found no trace of
God. Here we see a neurosis or something
worse. Instead of God or the “fear of God,”
there is an anxiety neurosis or some kind of
phobia. The emotion has remained the same,
but its object has changed both its name and
nature for the worse.

620 liquefy

tail, or lion, /Can, n. a large, fierce, tawny, loud-roaring
1 part animal of the cat family, the male with ahaggv

gment mane : (fig.) a man of unusual courage : (astron.)

inding the constellation or the sign Leo: any object of

ecome interest, esp. a famous or conspicuous person

?e, an much sought after (from the lions once kept in

inked : the Tower, one of the sights of l^ondon) : an old

(elect.) Scots coin, with a lion on the obverse, worth 74

coils: shillings Scots (James VI.): — fern. U'oness. — ru.

cscrib- li'oncel, li'onctlle, li'onel, (her.) a small lion

certain used as a bearing ; li onet, a young lion ; li'on-

> lion, heart, one with great courage. — adj. li'on-

em of heart ed. — ft. li'on-hunter, a hunter of lions :

issing one who runs after celebrities. — v.t. li onise, to

series treat as a lion or object of interest : to go around

irm in the sights of : to show the sights to. — n. ii'onism,

(Prob. lionising : lion-like appearance in leprosy. — odjs.

1 (pi.), li'on-like, li only. — lion's provider, the jackal,
supposed to attend upon the lion, really his hanger-
Shak.) on ; lion’s share, the whole or greater part ;

45

46

Left, St Paul struck down by the Above, Javanese farmers sacrifice a Above, in a modern sculpture by

impact of his vision of Christ (in cock to protect their fields from Britain's Jacob Epstein, man is seen

a painting by the 1 6th-century spirits. Such beliefs and practices as a mechanized monster — perhaps

Italian artist Caravaggio) . are fundamental

I recall a professor of philosophy who once
consulted me about his cancer phobia. He suf-
fered from a compulsive conviction that he had
a malignant tumor, although nothing of the
kind was ever found in dozens of X-rav pic-
tures. "Oh, I know there is nothing, " lie would
say„ "hut there might be something." What was
it that produced this idea? It obviously came
from a fear that was not instilled by conscious
deliberation. The morbid thought suddenly
overcame him, and it had a power of its own
that he could not control.

II was far more diflicuh for this educated
man to make an admission of this kind than it
would have been lor a primitive to sa\ that he
was plagued by a ghost. The malign influence
ol evil spirits is at least an aclmissi hie hypothesis
in <i primitive culture, but il is a shattering ex-
perience for a civilized person to admit that his
troubles an nothing more than a foolish prank
of the imagination. The primitive phenomenon
ol oh\rs \ tut/ has not vanished: it is the same as
ever. It is only interpreted in a different and
more obnoxious w ay.

1 have made several comparisons of this kind
between modern and primitive man. Such com-
parisons, as 1 shall show later, are essential to

in primitive life. an image of today s ' evil spirits. "

an understanding of the symbol-making pro-
pensities of' man, and of the part that dreams
play in expressing them. For one finds that
many dreams present images and associations
that are analogous to primitive ideas, myths,
and rites. These dream images were called
‘'archaic remnants" by Freud; the phrase sug-
gests that they are psychic elements surviving in
the human mind f rom ages long ago. This point
of view is characteristic of those who regard the
unconscious as a mere appendix of conscious-
ness (or, more picturesquely, as a trash can that
collects all the refuse of the conscious mind ).

Further investigation suggested to me that
this attitude is untenable and should be dis-
carded. I found that associations and images of
this kind are an integral part of the uncon-
scious, and can be observed everywhere
whether the dreamer is educated or illiterate,
intelligent or stupid. They are not in any sense
lifeless or meaningless "remnants." They still
function, and they are especially valuable <as
Dr. Henderson shows in a later c hapter of this
book) just because of their “historical" nature.
They form a bridge between the ways in w hic h
we consciously express our thoughts and a more
primitive, more colorful and pictorial form of

47

expression. It is this form, as well, that appeals
directly to feeling and emotion. These “histori-
cal” associations are the link between the
rational vvorld of consciousness and the world
of instinct*.

I have already discussed the interesting con-
trast between the “controlled” thoughts we have
in waking life and the wealth of imagery pro-
duced in dreams. Now you can see another
reason for this difference: Because, in our
civilized life, we have stripped so many ideas
of their emotional energy, we do not really
respond to them any more. We use such ideas
in our speech, and we show a conventional re-
action when others use them, but they do not
make a very deep impression on us. Something
more is needed to bring certain things home to
us effectively enough to make us change our
attitude and behavior. This is what “dream
language” does; its symbolism has so much
psychic energy that we are forced to pay atten-
tion to it.

There was, for instance, a lady who was well
known for her stupid prejudices and her stub-
born resistance to reasoned argument. One
could have argued with her all night to no
effect; she would have taken not the slightest
notice. Her dreams, however, took a different
line of approach. One night, she dreamed she
was attending an important social occasion.
She was greeted by the hostess with the words:
' How nice that you could come. All your

friends are here, and they are waiting for you.”
The hostess then led her to the door and opened
it, and the dreamer stepped through — into a
cowshed !

This dream language was simple enough to
be understood even by a blockhead. The
woman would not at first admit the point of a
dream that struck so directly at her self-import-
ance; but its message nevertheless went home,
and after a time she had to accept it because
she could not help seeing the self-inflicted joke.

Such messages from the unconscious are of
greater importance than most people realize.
In our conscious life, we are exposed to all kinds
of influences. Other people stimulate or depress
us, events at the office or in our social life dis-
tract us. Such things seduce us into following
ways that are unsuitable to our individuality.
Whether or not we are aware of the effect they
have on our consciousness, it is disturbed by
and exposed to them almost without defense.
This is especially the case with a person whose
extraverted attitude of mind lays all the em-
phasis upon external objects, or who harbors
feelings of inferiority and doubt concerning his
own innermost personality.

The more that consciousness is influenced by
prejudices, errors, fantasies, and infantile
wishes, the more the already existing gap will
widen into a neurotic dissociation and lead to
a more or less artificial fife, far removed from
healthy instincts, nature, and truth.

Left, two further visualizations
of spirits: Top, hellish demons
descend on St, Anthony (a painting
by the 1 6th-century German artist
Griinewald). Below, in the center
panel of a 1 9th -century Japanese
triptych, the ghost of a murdered
man strikes down his killer.

Ideological conflict breeds many
of modern man's "demons. " Right, a
cartoon by America's Gahan Wilson
depicts the shadow of the former
Russian leader Khrushchev as a
monstrous death-machine. Far right,
a cartoon from the Russian magazine
Krokodil shows “colonialism" as
a demonic wolf being driven into
the sea by the flags of various
independent African nations.

The general function of dreams is to try to
restore our psychological balance by producing
dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle
way, the total psychic equilibrium. This is what
I call the complementary (or compensatory)
role of dreams in our psychic make-up. It ex-
plains why people who have unrealistic ideas
or too high an opinion of themselves, or who
make grandiose plans out of proportion to their
real capacities, have dreams of flying or falling.
The dream compensates for the deficiencies of
their personalities, and at the same time it
warns them of the dangers in their present
course. If the warnings of the dream are dis-
regarded, real accidents may take their place.
The victim may fall downstairs or may have a
motor accident.

I remember the case of a man who was inex-
tricably involved in a number of shady affairs.
He developed an almost morbid passion for
dangerous mountain climbing, as a sort of com-
pensation. He was seeking “to get above him-
self.” In a dream one night, he saw himself
stepping off the summit of a high mountain
into empty space. When he told me his dream,
I instantly saw his danger and tried to empha-
size the warning and persuade him to restrain
himself. I even told him that the dream fore-

shadowed his death in a mountain accident. It
was in vain. Six months later he “stepped off'
into space.” A mountain guide watched him
and a friend letting themselves down on a rope
in a difficult place. The friend had found a
temporary foothold on a ledge, and the
dreamer was following him down. Suddenly he
let go of the rope, according to the guide, “as
if he were jumping into the air.” He fell upon
his friend, and both went down and were killed.

Another typical case was that of a lady who
was living above herself. She was high and
mighty in her daily life, but she had shocking
dreams, reminding her of all sorts of unsavory
things. When I discovered them, she indig-
nantly refused to acknowledge them. The
dreams then became menacing, and full of
references to the walks she used to take by her-
self in the woods, where she indulged in soulful
fantasies. I saw her danger, but she would not
listen to my many warnings. Soon afterwards,
she was savagely attacked in the woods by a
sexual pervert; but for the intervention of some
people who heard her screams, she would have
been killed.

There was no magic in this. What her
dreams had told me was that this woman had
a secret longing for such an adventure— just as

50

Left, two influences to which an
individual's consciousness is
subjected: Advertising {a 1 960s
American advertisement stressing
"sociability") and political
propaganda (a French poster for
a 1 962 referendum, urging a vote
of "yes" but plastered with the
opposition's "no"). These and other
influences may cause us to live
in ways unsuited to our individual
natures; and the psychic imbalance
that can follow must be compensated
for by the unconscious.

The lighthouse keeper, right (in
a cartoon by America's Roland B
Wilson), has apparently become
a little disturbed psychologically
by his isolation His unconscious,
in its compensatory function, has
produced a hallucinatory companion,
to whom the keeper confesses (in
the cartoon caption) : "Not only
that, Bill, but I caught myself
talking to myself again yesterday !"

The Delphic oracle, below, being
consulted by King Aegeus of Athens
(from a vase painting). "Messages"
from the unconscious are often as
cryptic and ambiguous as were the
oracle's utterances.

the mountain climber unconsciously sought the
satisfaction of finding a definite way out of his
difficulties. Obviously, neither of them expected
the stiff price involved: She had several bones
broken, and he paid with his life.

Thus dreams may sometimes announce cer-
tain situations long before they actually happen.
This is not necessarily a miracle or a form of
precognition. Many crises in our lives have a
long unconscious history. We move toward
them step by step, unaware of the dangers that
are accumulating. But what we consciously fail
to see is frequently perceived by our uncon-
scious, which can pass the information on
through dreams.

Dreams may often warn us in this way; but
just as often, it seems, they do not. Therefore,
any assumption of a benevolent hand restrain-
ing us in time is dubious. Or, to state it more
positively, it seems that a benevolent agency is
sometimes at work and sometimes not. The
mysterious hand may even point the way to
perdition; dreams sometimes prove to be traps,
or appear to be so. They sometimes behave like
the Delphic oracle that told King Croesus that
if he crossed the Halys River he would destroy
a large kingdom. It was only after he had been
completely defeated in battle after the crossing

.i 1

that he discovered that the kingdom meant by
the oracle was his own.

One cannot afford to be naive in dealing
with dreams. They originate in a spirit that is
not quite human, but is rather a breath of
nature — a spirit of the beautiful and generous
as well as of the cruel goddess. If we want to
characterize this spirit, we shall certainly get
closer to it in the sphere of ancient mythologies,
or the fables of the primeval forest, than in the
consciousness of modern man. I am not deny-
ing that great gains have resulted from the
evolution of civilized society. But these gains
have been made at the price of enormous losses,
whose extent we have scarcely begun to esti-
mate. Part of the purpose of my comparisons
between the primitive and the civilized states of
man has been to show the balance of these
losses and gains.

Primitive man was much more governed by
his instincts than are his “rational" modern de-
scendants, who have learned to “control" them-
selves. In this civilizing process, we have
increasingly divided our consciousness from the
deeper instinctive strata of the human psyche,
and even ultimately from the somatic basis of
the psychic phenomenon. Fortunately, we have
not lost these basic instinctive strata; they re-
main part of the unconscious, even though
they may express themselves only in the form of
dream images. These instinctive phenomena —
one may not, incidentally, always recognize
them for what they are, for their character is
symbolic play a vital part in what I have
called the compensating function of dreams.

For the sake of mental stability and even
physiological health, the unconscious and the
conscious must be integrally connected and thus
move on parallel lines. If tliVy are split apart
or “dissociated," psychological disturbance fol-
lows. In this respect, dream symbols are the
essential message carriers from the instinctive to
the rational parts of the human mind, and their
interpretation enriches the poverty of conscious-
ness so that it learns to understand again the
forgotten language of the instincts.

Of course, people are bound to query this
function, since its symbols so often pass un-

noticed or uncomprehended. In normal life, the
understanding of dreams is often considered
superfluous. I can illustrate this by my experi-
ence with a primitive tribe in F,ast Africa. To
my amazement, these tribesmen denied that
they had any dreams. But through patient, in-
direct talks with them I soon found that they
had dreams just like everyone else, but that
they were convinced their dreams had no
meaning. “Dreams of ordinary men mean
nothing," they told me. They thought that the
only dreams that mattered were those of chiefs
and medicine men; these, which concerned the
welfare of the tribe, were highly appreciated.
The only drawback w'as that the chiei and the
medicine man both claimed that they had
ceased having meaningful dreams. They dated
this change from the time that the British came
to their country. The district commissioner —
the British official in charge of therm had
taken over the function of the “great dreams"
that had hitherto guided the tribe's behavior.

When these tribesmen conceded that they did
have dreams, but thought them meaningless,
they were like the modern man who thinks that
a dream has no significance for him simply be-
cause he does not understand it. But even a
civilized man can sometimes observe that a
dream (which he may not even remember) can
alter his mood for better or worse. The dream

5 2

has been “comprehended,” but only in a sub-
liminal way. And that is what usually happens.
It is only on the rare occasions when a dream
is particularly impressive or repeats itself at
regular intervals that most people consider an
interpretation desirable.

Here I ought to add a word of warning
against unintelligent or incompetent dream
analysis. There are some people whose mental
condition is so unbalanced that the interpreta-
tion of their dreams can be extremely risky; in
such a case, a very one-sided consciousness is
cut off from a correspondingly irrational or
“crazy” unconscious, and the two should not
be brought together without taking special
precautions.

And, speaking more generally, it is plain fool-
ishness to believe in ready-made systematic
guides to dream interpretation, as if one could
simply buy a reference book and look up a par-
ticular symbol. No dream symbol can be sepa-
rated from the individual who dreams it, and
there is no definite or straightforward interpre-
tation of any dream. Each individual varies so
much in the way that his unconscious comple-
ments or compensates his conscious mind that
it is impossible to be sure how far dreams and
their symbols can be classified at all.

It is true that there are dreams and single
symbols (I should prefer to call them “motifs”)

that are typical and often occur. Among such
motifs are falling, flying, being persecuted by
dangerous animals or hostile men, being insuffi-
ciently or absurdly clothed in public places,
being in a hurry or lost in a milling crowd,
fighting with useless weapons or being wholly
defenseless, running hard yet getting nowhere.
A typical infantile motif is the dream of grow-
ing infinitely small or infinitely big, or being
transformed from one to the other— as you find
it, for instance, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Won-
derland. But I must stress again that these are
motifs that must be considered in the context of
the dream itself, not as self-explanatory ciphers.

The recurring dream is a noteworthy pheno-
menon. There are cases in which people have
dreamed the same dream from childhood into
the later years of adult life. A dream of this
kind is usually an attempt to compensate for a
particular defect in the dreamer’s attitude to
life; or it may date from a traumatic moment
that has left behind some specific prejudice. It
may also sometimes anticipate a future event
of importance.

I myself dreamed of a motif over several
years, in which I would “discover” a part of my
house that I did not know existed. Sometimes
it was the quarters where my long-dead parents
lived, in which my father, to my surprise, had
a laboratory where he studied the comparative

Left, a photograph of Jung (fourth
from the right) in 1 926 with the
tribesmen of Mt. Elgon, Kenya.
Jung's firsthand study of primitive
societies led to many of his most
valuable psychological insights.

Right, two dream books — one from
20th-century Britain and the other
from ancient Egypt (the latter is
among the oldest written documents
extant, c. 2000 b.c.). Such ready-
made, rule-of-thumb interpretation
of dreams is worthless; dreams are
highly individualized, and their
symbolism cannot be pigeonholed.

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53

anatomy of fish and my mother ran a hotel for
ghostly visitors. Usually this unfamiliar guest
wing was an ancient historical building, long
forgotten, yet my inherited property. It con-
tained interesting antique furniture, and toward
the end of this series of dreams I discovered an
old library whose books were unknown to me.
Finally, in the last dream, I opened one of the
books and found in it a profusion of the most
marvelous symbolic pictures. When I awoke,
my heart was palpitating with excitement.

Some time before I had this particular last
dream of the series, I had placed an order with
an antiquarian bookseller for one of the classic
compilations of medieval alchemists. I had
found a quotation in literature that I thought
might have some connection with early Byzan-
tine alchemy, and I wished to check it. Several
weeks after I had had the dream of the un-
known book, a parcel arrived from the book-
seller. Inside was a parchment volume dating
from the 16th century. It was illustrated by
fascinating symbolic pictures that instantly re-
minded me of those I had seen in my dream.
As the rediscovery of the principles of alchemy
came to be an important part of my work as a
pioneer of psychology, the motif of my recur-
ring dream can easily be understood. The
house, of course, was a symbol of my person-
ality and its conscious field of interests; and the
unknown annex represented the anticipation of
a new field of interest and research of which my
conscious mind was at that time unaware. From
that moment, 30 years ago, I never had the
dream again.

1

Top of page, a famous example of
the common dream of growing larger:
a drawing from Alice in Wonderland
(1 877) shows Alice growing to fill
a house. Center, the equally common
dream of flying, in a 1 9th-century
drawing (by the British artist
William Blake) entitled: "O, How
I Dreamt of Things Impossible."

54

r

The analysis of dreams

I began this essay by noting the difference be-
tween a sign and a symbol. The sign is always
less than the concept it represents, while a sym-
bol always stands for something more than its
obvious and immediate meaning. Symbols,
moreover, are natural and spontaneous pro-
ducts. No genius has ever sat down with a pen
or a brush in his hand and said: “Now I am
going to invent a symbol.” No one can take a
more or less rational thought, reached as a logi-
cal conclusion or by deliberate intent, and then
give it “symbolic” form. No matter what fan-
tastic trappings one may put upon an idea of
this kind, it will still remain a sign, linked to
the conscious thought behind it, not a symbol
that hints at something not yet known. In
dreams, symbols occur spontaneously, for
dreams happen and are not invented ; they are,
therefore, the main source of all our knowledge
about symbolism.

But symbols, I must point out, do not occur
solely in dreams. They appear in all kinds of
psychic manifestations. There are symbolic
thoughts and feelings, symbolic acts and situa-
tions. It often seems that even inanimate objects
co-operate with the unconscious in the arrange-
ment of symbolic patterns. There are numerous
well-authenticated stories of clocks stopping at
the moment of their owner’s death; one was
the pendulum clock in the palace of Frederick
the Great at Sans Souci, which stopped when

+

the king died. Other common examples are
those of a mirror that breaks, or a picture that
falls, when a death occurs; or minor but unex-
plained breakages in a house where someone is
passing through an emotional crisis. Even if
skeptics refuse to credit such reports, stories of
this kind are always cropping up, and this alone
should serve as ample proof of their psycho-
logical importance.

There are many symbols, however (among
them the most important), that are not indi-
vidual but collective in their nature and origin.
These are chiefly religious images. The believer
assumes that they are of divine origin — that
they have been revealed to man. The skeptic
says flatly that they have been invented. Both
are wrong. It is true, as the skeptic notes, that
religious symbols and concepts have for cen-
turies been the object of careful and quite con-
scious elaboration. It is equally true, as the be-
liever implies, that their origin is so far buried
in the mystery of the past that they seem to
have no human source. But they are in fact
“collective representations,” emanating from
primeval dreams and creative fantasies. As
such, these images are involuntary spontaneous
manifestations and by no means intentional
inventions.

This fact, as I shall later explain, has a direct
and important bearing upon the interpretation
of dreams. It is obvious that if you assume the

Inanimate objects sometimes seem
to ''act'' symbolically: left, the
clock of Frederick the Great, which
stopped when its owner died in 1 786.

Symbols are produced spontaneously
from the unconscious (though they
may later be consciously elaborated).
Right, the ankh, ancient Egypt's
symbol of life, the universe, and
man. By contrast, the airways
insignia (far right) are consciously
contrived signs, not symbols.

55

dream to be symbolic, you will interpret it dif-
ferently from a person who believes that the
essential energizing thought or emotion is
known already and is merely “disguised” by the
‘dream. In the latter case, dream interpretation
makes little sense, for you find only what you
already know.

It is for this reason that I have always said
to my pupils: “Learn as much as you can
about symbolism; then forget it all when you
are analyzing a dream/’ This advice is of such
practical importance that I have made it a rule
to remind myself that I can never understand
somebody else’s dream well enough to interpret
it correctly. I have done this in order to check
the flow of my own associations and reactions,
which might otherwise prevail over my patient’s
uncertainties and hesitations. As it is of the
greatest therapeutic importance for an analyst
to get the particular message of a dream (that
is, the contribution that the unconscious is mak-
ing to the conscious mind) as accurately as pos-
sible, it is essential for him to explore the con-
tent of a dream with the utmost thoroughness.

I had a dream when I was working with
Freud that illustrates this point. I dreamed that
I was in “my home,” apparently on the first
floor, in a cosy, pleasant sitting room furnished
in the manner of the 18th century. I was aston-
ished that I had never seen this room before,
and began to wonder what the ground floor
was like. I went downstairs and found the place
was rather dark, with paneled walls and heavy

furniture dating from the 16th century or even
earlier. My surprise and curiosity increased. I
wanted to see more of the whole structure of
this house. So I went down to the cellar, where
I found a door opening onto a flight of stone
steps that led to a large vaulted room. The floor
consisted of large slabs of stone and the walls
seemed very ancient. I examined the mortar
and found it was mixed with splinters of brick.
Obviously the walls were of Roman origin. I
became increasingly excited. In one corner, I
saw an iron ring on a stone slab. I pulled up
the slab and saw yet another narrow flight of
steps leading to a kind of cave, which seemed
to be a prehistoric tomb, containing two skulls,
some bones, and broken shards of pottery. Then
I woke up.

If Freud, when he analyzed this dream, had
followed my method of exploring its specific
associations and context, he would have heard
a far-reaching story. But I am afraid he would
have dismissed it as a mere effort to escape
from a problem that was really his own. The
dream is in fact a short summary of my life,
more specifically of the development of my
mind. I grew up in a house 200 years old, our
furniture consisted mostly of pieces about 300
years old, and mentally my hitherto greatest
spiritual adventure had been to study the philo-
sophies of Kant and Schopenhauer. The great
news of the day was the work of Charles Dar-
win. Shortly before this, I had been living with
the still medieval concepts of my parents, for

\

Right, Jung's mother and father.
Jung's interest in ancient religion
and mythology drew him away from
the religious world of his parents
(his father was a pastor) — as
shown by the dream, discussed
on this page, that he had while
working with Freud. Far right,

Jung at Burgholzli Hospital, Zurich,
where he worked in 1 900 as a
psychiatrist.

56

r whom the world and men were still presided
over by divine omnipotence and providence.

, This world had become antiquated and obso-
lete. My Christian faith had become relative
through its encounter with Eastern religions
and Greek philosophy. It is for this reason that
the ground floor was so still, dark, and obvi-
ously uninhabited.

My then historical interests had developed
from an original preoccupation with compara-
tive anatomy and paleontology while I was
working as an assistant at the Anatomical In-
stitute. I was fascinated by the bones of fossil
man, particularly by the much discussed Nean-
derthalensis and the still more controversial
skull of Dubois’ Pithecanthropus. As a matter
of fact these were my real associations to the
dream; but I did not dare to mention the sub-
ject of skulls, skeletons, or corpses to Freud,
because I had learned that this theme was not
popular with him. He cherished the peculiar
idea that I anticipated his early death. And he
drew this conclusion from the fact that I had
shown much interest in the mummified corpses
in the so-called Bleikeller in Bremen, which we
visited together in 1909 on our way to take the
boat to America.

Thus I felt reluctant to come out with my
own thoughts, since through recent experience
I was deeply impressed by the almost unbridge-
• able gap between Freud’s mental outlook and
background and my own. I was afraid of losing
his friendship if I should open up to him about

my own inner world, which, I surmised, would
look very queer to him. Feeling quite uncertain
about my own psychology, I almost automati-
cally told him a lie about my “free associations”
in order to escape the impossible task of enlight-
ening him about my very personal and utterly
different constitution.

I must apologize for this rather lengthy nar-
ration of the jam I got into through telling
Freud my dream. But it is a good example of
the difficulties in which one gets involved in
the course of a real dream analysis. So much
depends upon the personal differences between
the analyst and the analyzed.

I soon realized that Freud was looking for
some incompatible wish of mine. And so I sug-
gested tentatively that the skulls I had dreamed
of might refer to certain members of my family
whose death, for some reason, I might desire.
This proposal met with his approval, but I was
not satisfied with such a “phoney” solution.

While I was trying to find a suitable answer
to Freud’s questions, I was suddenly confused
by an intuition about the role that the subjec-
tive factor plays in psychological understand-
ing. My intuition was so overwhelming that I
thought only of how to get out of' this impos-
sible snarl, and I took the easy way out bv a
lie. This was neither elegant nor morally defen-
sible, but otherwise I should have risked a fatal
row with Freud — and I did not feel up to that
for many reasons.

My intuition consisted of the sudden and
most unexpected insight into the fact that my
dream meant myself, my life and my world, my
whole reality against a theoretical structure
erected by another, strange mind for reasons
and purposes of its own. It was not Freud’s
dream , it was mine ; and I understood suddenly
in a flash what my dream meant.

This conflict illustrates a vital point about
dream analysis. It is not so much a technique
that can be learned and applied according to
the rules as it is a dialectical exchange between
two personalities. If it is handled as a mechani-
cal technique, the individual psychic person-
ality of the dreamer gets lost and the thera-
peutic problem is reduced to the simple ques-

57

tion: Which of the two people concerned — the
analyst or the dreamer — will dominate the
other? I gave up hypnotic treatment for this
very reason, because I did not want to impose
my will on others. I wanted the healing pro-
cesses to grow out of the patient’s own person-
ality, not from suggestions by me that would
have only a passing effect. My aim was to pro-
tect and preserve my patient’s dignity and free-
dom, so that he could live his life according to
his own wishes. In this exchange with Freud, it
dawned on me for the first time that before we
construct general theories about man and his
psyche we should learn a lot more about the
real human being we have to deal with.

The individual is the only reality. The further
we move away from the individual toward ab-
stract ideas about Homo sapiens , the more likely
we are to fall into error. In these times of social
upheaval and rapid change, it is desirable to
know much more than we do about the indi-
vidual human being, for so much depends upon
his mental and moral qualities. But if we are
to see things in their right perspective, we need
to understand the past of man as well as his
present. That is why an understanding of myths
and symbols is of essential importance.

The problem of types

In all other branches of science, it is legitimate
to apply a hypothesis to an impersonal subject.
Psychology, however, inescapably confronts
you with the living relations between two indi-
viduals, neither of whom can be divested of his
subjective personality, nor, indeed, depersonal-
ized in any other way. The analyst and his
patient may set out by agreeing to deal with a
chosen problem in an impersonal and objective
manner; but once they are engaged, their
whole personalities are involved in their discus-
sion. At this point, further progress is. possible
only if mutual agreement can be reached.

Can we make any sort of objective judgment
about the final result? Only if we make a com-
parison between our conclusions and the stan-
dards that are generally valid in the social
milieu to which the individuals belong. Even
then, we must take into account the mental
equilibrium (or “sanity”) of the individual con-
cerned. For the result cannot be a completely
collective leveling out of the individual to

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An assertive extravert overpowers
a withdrawn introvert in a cartoon
by America's Jules Feiffer. These
Jungian terms for human "types"
are not dogmatic: For instance,
Gandhi, right, was both an ascetic
(introvert) and a political leader
(extravert). An individual — any face
in the crowd (far right) —can only
more or/e^s be categorized.

adjust him to the “norms” of his society. This
would amount to a most unnatural condition.
A sane and normal society is one in which
people habitually disagree, because general
agreement is relatively rare outside the sphere
of instinctive human qualities.

Disagreement functions as a vehicle of
mental life in society, but it is not a goal ; agree-
ment is equally important. Because psychology
basically depends upon balanced opposites, no
judgment can be considered to be final in
which its reversibility has not been taken into
account. The reason for this peculiarity lies in
the fact that there is no standpoint above or
outside psychology that would enable us to
form an ultimate judgment of what the
psyche is.

In spite of the fact that dreams demand indi-
vidual treatment, some generalities are neces-
sary in order to classify and clarify the material
that the psychologist collects by studying many
individuals. It would obviously be impossible to

formulate any psychological theory, or to teach
it, by describing large numbers of separate cases
without any effort to see what they have in
common and how they differ. Any general
characteristic can be chosen as a basis. One
can, for instance, make a relatively simple dis-
tinction between individuals who have “extra-
verted” personalities and others who are “intro-
verted.” This is only one of many possible
generalizations, but it enables one to see imme-
diately the difficulties that can arise if the ana-
lyst should happen to be one type and his
patient the other.

Since any deeper analysis of dreams leads to
the confrontation of two individuals, it will
obviously make a great diff erence whether their
types of attitude are the same or not. If both
belong to the same type, they may sail along
happily for a long time. But if one is an extra-
vert and the other an introvert, their different
and contradictory standpoints may clash right
away, particularly when they are unaware of

59

their own type of personality, or when they
are convinced that their own is the only right
type. The extravert, for instance, will choose
the majority view; the introvert will reject it
simply because it is fashionable. Such a mis-
understanding is easy enough because the value
of the one is the non-value of the other. Freud
himself, for instance, interpreted the introverted
type as an individual morbidly concerned with
himself. But introspection and self-knowledge
can just as well be of the greatest value and
importance.

It is vitally necessary to take account of such
differences of personality in dream interpreta-
tion. It cannot be assumed that the analyst is a
superman who is above such differences, just
because he is a doctor who has acquired a
psychological theory and a corresponding tech-
nique. He can only imagine himself' to be
superior in so far as he assumes that his theory
and technique are absolute truths, capable of
embracing the whole of' the human psyche.
Since such an assumption is more than doubt-
ful. he cannot really be sure of it. Consequently,
he will be assailed by secret doubts if he con-
fronts the human wholeness of his patient with
a theory or technique (which is merely a hypo-
thesis or an attempt) instead of with his own
liv ing wholeness.

The analyst's whole personality is the only
adequate equivalent of his patient’s personality.
Psychological experience and knowledge do not

amount to more than mere advantages on the
side of the analyst. They do not keep him out-
side the fray, in which he is bound to be tested
just as much as his patient. Thus it matters a
good deal whether their personalities are har-
monious, in conflict, or complementary.

Extra version and introversion are just two
among many peculiarities of human behavior.
But they are often rather obvious and easily
recognizable. If one studies extraverted indi-
viduals, for instance, one soon discovers that
they differ in many ways from one another,
and that being extraverted is therefore a super-
ficial and too general criterion to be really
characteristic. That is why, long ago, I tried to
find some further basic peculiarities — peculiari-
ties that might serve the purpose of giving some
order to the apparently limitless variations in
human individuality.

I had always been impressed by the fact that
there are a surprising number of individuals
who never use their minds if they can avoid it,
and an equal number who do use their minds,
but in an amazingly stupid way. I was also
surprised to find many intelligent and wide-
awake people who lived (as far as one could
make out) as if they had never learned to use
their sense organs: They did not see the things
before their eyes, hear the words sounding in
their ears, or notice the things they touched or
tasted. Some lived without being aware of the
state of their own bodies.

The "compass" of the psyche —
another Jungian way of looking at
people in general. Each point on the
compass has its opposite: for a
"thinking" type, the "feeling" side
would be least developed. ("Feeling"
here means the faculty of weighing
and evaluating experience — in the
way that one might say "I feel that is
a good thing to do," without needing
to analyze or rationalize the "why"
of the action.) Of course, there is
overlapping in each individual: In
a "sensation" person the thinking
or the feeling side could be almost
as strong (and "intuition," the
opposite, would be weakest) .

bo

Feeling

There were others who seemed to live in a
most curious condition of consciousness, as if
the state they had arrived at today were final,
with no possibility of change, or as if the world
and the psyche were static and would remain
so forever. They seemed devoid of all imagina-
tion, and they entirely and exclusively de-
pended upon their sense-perception. Chances
and possibilities did not exist in their world,
and in “today” there was no real “tomorrow.”
The future was just the repetition of the past.

I am trying here to. give the reader a glimpse
of my own first impressions when I began to
observe the many people I met. It soon became
clear to me, however, that the people who used
their minds were those who thought— that is,
who applied their intellectual faculty in trying
to adapt^ themselves to people and circum-
stances. And the equally intelligent people who
did not think were those who sought and found
their way by feeling.

“Feeling” is a word that needs some explana-
tion. For instance, one speaks of “feeling” when
it is a matter of “sentiment” (corresponding to
the French term sentiment ). But one also
applies the same word to define an opinion;
for example, a communication from the White
House may begin: “The President feels . . . .”
Furthermore, the word may be used to express
an intuition: “I had a feeling as if . . . .”

When I use the word “feeling” in contrast
to “thinking,” I refer to a judgment of value —
for instance, agreeable or disagreeable, good or
bad, and so on. Feeling according to this defi-
nition is not an emotion (which, as the word
conveys, is involuntary). Feeling as I mean it is
(like thinking) a rational (i.c. ordering) func-
tion, whereas intuition is an irrational (i.c.
perceiving) function. In so far as intuition is a
“hunch,” it is not the product of a voluntary
act; it is rather an involuntary event, which
depends upon different external or internal cir-
cumstances instead of an act of judgment.
Intuition is more like a sense-perception, which
is also an irrational event in so far as it de-
pends essentially upon objective stimuli, which
owe their existence to physical and not to
mental causes.

These four functional types correspond to the
obvious means by which consciousness obtains
its orientation to experience. Sensation (i.c.
sense-perception) tells you that something
exists; thinking tells you what it is ; feeling tells
you whether it is agreeable or not; and intuition
tells you whence it comes and where it is going.

The reader should understand that these
four criteria of types of human behavior are
just four viewpoints among many others, like
will power, temperament, imagination, mem-
ory, and so on. There is nothing dogmatic about
them, but their basic nature recommends them
as suitable criteria for a classification. I find
them particularly helpful when I am called
upon to explain parents to children and hus-
bands to wives, and vice versa. They are also
useful in understanding one’s own prejudices.

Thus, if you want to understand another
person’s dream, you have to sacrifice your own
predilections and suppress your prejudices. This
is not easy or comfortable, because it means a
moral effort that is not to everyone’s taste. But
if the analyst does not make the effort to criti-
cize his own standpoint and to admit its rela-
tivity, he will get neither the right information
about, nor sufficient insight into, his patient’s
mind. The analyst expects at least a certain
willingness on the patient’s part to listen to his
opinion and to take it seriously, and the patient
must be granted the same right. Although such
a relationship is indispensable for any under-
standing and is therefore of self-evident neces-
sity, one must remind oneself again and again
that it is more important in therapy for the
patient to understand than for the analyst’s
theoretical expectations to be satisfied. The
patient’s resistance to the analyst’s interpreta-
tion is not necessarily wrong; it is rather a sure
sign that something does not “click.” Father the
patient has not yet reached the point where he
understands, or the interpretation does not fit.

In our efforts to interpret the dream symbols
of another person, we are almost invariably'
hampered by our tendency to fill in the un-
avoidable gaps in our understanding by pro-
jection that is, by the assumption that what
the analyst perceives or thinks is equally per-

61

ceived or thought by the dreamer. To overcome
this source of error, I have always insisted on
the importance of sticking to the context of the
particular dream and excluding all theoretical
assumptions about dreams in general — except
for the hypothesis that dreams in some way
make sense.

It will be clear from all I have said that we
cannot lay down general rules for interpreting
dreams. When I suggested earlier that the over*
all function of dreams seems to be to compen-
sate for deficiencies or distortions in the
conscious mind, I meant that this assumption
opened up the most promising approach to the
nature of particular dreams. In some cases you
can see this function plainly demonstrated.

One of my patients had a very high opinion
of himself and was unaware that almost every-
one who knew him was irritated by his air of
moral superiority. He came to me with a dream
in which he had seen a drunken tramp rolling
in a ditch — a sight that evoked from him only
the patronizing comment: “It's terrible to see
how low a man can fall.” It was evident that
the unpleasant nature of the dream was at
least in part an attempt to offset his inflated
opinion of his own merits. But there was some-
thing more to it than this. It turned out that
he had a brother who was a degenerate alco-
holic. What the dream also revealed was that
his superior attitude was compensating the
brother, as both an outer and an inner figure.

In another case I recall, a woman who was
proud of her intelligent understanding of
psychology had recurring dreams about another
woman. When in ordinary life she met this
woman, she did not like her, thinking her a
vain and dishonest intriguer. But in the dreams
the woman appeared almost as a sister, friendly
and likeable. My patient could not understand
why she should dream so favorably about a
person she disliked. But these dreams were try-
ing to convey the idea that she herself was
“shadowed" by an unconscious character that
resembled the other woman. It was hard for
my patient, who had very clear ideas about her
own personality, to realize that the dream was
telling her about her own power complex and

her hidden motivations — unconscious influen-
ces that had more than once led to disagreeable
rows with her friends. She had always blamed
others for these, not herself.

It is not merely the “shadow” side of our per-
sonalities that we overlook, disregard, and re-
press. We may also do the same to our positive
qualities. An example that comes to mind is
that of an apparently modest and self-effacing
man, with charming manners. He always
seemed content with a back seat, but discreetly
insisted on being present. When asked to speak
he would offer a well-informed opinion, though
he never intruded it. But he sometimes hinted
that a given matter could be dealt with in a
far superior way at a certain higher level
(though he never explained how).

In his dreams, however, he constantly had
encounters with great historical figures, such
as Napoleon and Alexander the Great. These
dreams were clearly compensating for an in-
feriority complex. But they had another impli-
cation. What sort of man must I be, the dream
was asking, to have such illustrious callers? In
this respect the dreams pointed to a secret meg-

62

alomania, which offset the dreamer’s feeling of
inferiority. This unconscious idea of grandeur
insulated him from the reality of his environ-
ment and enabled him to remain aloof from
obligations that would be imperative for other
people. He felt no need to prove — either to
himself or to others — that his superior judg-
ment was based on superior merit.

He was, in fact, unconsciously playing an
insane game, and the dreams were seeking to
bring it to the level of consciousness in a curi-
ously ambiguous way. Hobnobbing with Napo-
leon and being on speaking terms with
Alexander the Great are exactly the kind of
fantasies produced by an inferiority complex.
But why, one asks, could not the dream be
open and direct about it and say what it had
to say without ambiguity?

I have frequently been asked this question,
and I have asked it myself. I am often surprised
at the tantalizing way dreams seem to evade
definite information or omit the decisive point.
Freud assumed the existence of a special func-
tion of the psyche, which he called the “cen-
sor.” This, he supposed, twisted the dream

images and made them unrecognizable or mis-
leading in order to deceive the dreaming con-
sciousness about the real subject of the dream.
By concealing the critical thought from the
dreamer, the “censor” protected his sleep
against the shock of a disagreeable reminiscence.
But I am skeptical about the theory that the
dream is a guardian of sleep; dreams just as
often disturb sleep.

It rather looks as if the approach to con-
sciousness has a “blotting-out” effect upon the
subliminal contents of the psyche. The sublimi-
nal state retains ideas and images at a much
lower level of tension than they possess in con-
sciousness. In the subliminal condition they
lose clarity of definition; the relations between
them are less consequential and more vaguely
analogous, less rational and therefore more “in-
comprehensible .’ 1 This can also be observed in
all dreamlike conditions, whether due to
fatigue, fever, or toxins. But if something hap-
pens to endow any of these images with greater
tension, they become less subliminal and, as
they come close to the threshold of conscious-
ness, more sharply defined.

Left, a down-and-out alcoholic in
a New York slum (from the 1 955 film
On the Bowery). Such a figure might
appear in the dreams of a man who
felt himself to be superior to
others. In this way his unconscious
would be compensating for his
conscious mind's onesidedness.

Right, The Nightmare, painted by
the 1 8th-century Swiss-born artist
Henry Fuseli. Almost everyone has
been awakened, upset, or disturbed
by his dreams; our sleep does not
appear to be protected from the
contents of the unconscious.

It is from this fact that one may understand
why dreams often express themselves as analo-
gies, why one dream image slides into another,
and why neither the logic nor the time scale
of our waking life seems to apply. The form
that dreams take is natural to the unconscious
because the material from which they are pro-
duced is retained in the subliminal state in pre-
cisely this fashion. Dreams do not guard sleep
from what Freud called the “incompatible
wish.” What he called “disguise” is actually
the shape all* impulses naturally take in the
unconscious. Thus, a dream cannot produce a
definite thought. If it begins to do so, it ceases
to be a dream because it crosses the threshold
of consciousness. That is why dreams seem to
skip the very points that are most important to
the conscious mind, and seem rather to mani-
fest the “fringe of consciousness,” like the faint
gleam of stars during a total eclipse of the sun.

We should understand that dream symbols
are for the most part manifestations of a psyche
that is beyond the control of the conscious
mind. Meaning and purposefulness are not the
prerogatives of the mind ; they operate in the
whole of living nature. There is no difference
in principle between organic and psychic
growth. As a plant produces its flower, so the
psyche creates its symbols. Every dream is
evidence of this process.

So, by means of dreams (plus all sorts of
intuitions, impulses, and other spontaneous
events), instinctive forces influence the activity
of consciousness. Whether that influence is for
better or for worse depends upon the actual
contents of the unconscious. If it contains too
many things that normally ought to be con-
scious, then its function becomes twisted and
prejudiced; motives appear that are not based
upon true instincts, but that owe their exist-
ence and psychic importance to the fact that
they have been consigned to the unconscious by
repression or neglect. They overlay, as it were,
the normal unconscious psyche and distort its
natural tendency to express basic symbols and
motifs. Therefore it is reasonable for a psycho-
analyst, concerned with the causes of a mental
disturbance, to begin by eliciting from his

patient a more or less voluntary confession and
realization of everything that the patient dis-
likes or fears.

This is like the much older confession of the
Church, which in many ways anticipated
modern psychological techniques. At least this
is the general rule. In practice, however, it may
work the other way round ; overpowering feel-
ings of inferiority or serious weakness may make
it very difficult, even impossible, for the patient
to face fresh evidence of his own inadequacy.
So I have often found it profitable to begin by
giving a positive outlook to the patient; this
provides a helpful sense of security when he
approaches the more painful insights.

Take as an example a dream of “personal
exaltation” in which, for instance, one has tea
with the queen of England, or finds oneself on
intimate terms with the pope. If the dreamer
is not a schizophrenic, the practical interpreta-
tion of the symbol depends very much upon his
present state of mind - that is, the condition of
his ego. If the dreamer overestimates his own
value, it is easy to show (from the material pro-
duced by association of ideas) how inappropri-
ate and childish the dreamer’s intentions are,
and how much they emanate from childish
wishes to be equal to or superior to his parents.
But if it is a case of inferiority, where an all-
pervading feeling of worthlessness has already
overcome every positive aspect of the dreamer’s
personality, it would be quite wrong to depress
him still more by showing how infantile, ridicu-
lous, or even perverse he is. That would cruelly
increase his inferiority, as well as cause an
unwelcome and quite unnecessary resistance to
the treatment.

There is no therapeutic technique or doctrine
that is of general application, since every case
that one receives for treatment is an individual
in a specific condition. I remember a patient I
once had to treat over a period of nine years.

Right, the heroic dreams with which
Walter Mitty (in the 1 947 film of
James Thurber's story) compensates
his sense of inferiority.

I saw him only for a few weeks each year, since
he lived abroad. From the start I knew what his
real trouble was, but I also saw that the least
attempt to get close to the truth was met by a
violent defensive reaction that threatened a
complete rupture between us. Whether I liked
it or not, I had to do my best to maintain our
relation and to follow his inclination, which was
supported by his dreams and which led our
discussion away from the root of his neurosis.
We ranged so widely that 1 often accused myself
of leading my patient astray. Nothing but the
fact that his condition slowly but clearly
improved prevented me from confronting him
brutally with the truth.

In the 10th year, however, the patient de-
clared himself to be cured and freed from all
his symptoms. I was surprised because theoreti-
cally his condition was incurable. Noticing my
astonishment, he smiled and said (in effect) :
“And I want to thank you above all for your
unfailing tact and patience in helping me to
circumvent the painful cause of my neurosis.

I am now ready to tell you everything about it.

If I had been able to talk freely about it, I
would have told you what it was at my first
consultation. But that would have destroyed
my rapport with you. Where should I have been
then? I should have been morally bankrupt. In
the course of 10 years I have learned to trust
you; and as my confidence grew, my condi-
tion improved. I improved because this slow
process restored my belief in myself. Now I am
strong enough to discuss the problem that was
destroying me.”

He then made a devastatingly frank confes-
sion of his problem, which showed me the reas-
ons for the peculiar course our treatment had
had to follow. The original shock had been
such that alone he had been unable to face it.
He needed the help of another, and the thera-
peutic task was the slow establishment of con-
fidence, rather than the demonstration of a
clinical theory.

From cases like this I learned to adapt my
methods to the needs of the individual patient,
rather than to commit myself to general theore-
tical considerations that might be inapplicable

6 5

in any particular case. The knowledge of
human nature that I have accumulated in the
course of 60 years of practical experience has
taught me to consider each case as a new one
in which, first of* all, I have had to seek the in-
dividual approach. Sometimes I have not hesi-
tated to plunge into a careful study ol infantile
events and fantasies; at other times I have be-
gun at the top, even if this has meant soaring
straight into the most remote metaphysical
speculations. It all depends on learning the
language of the individual patient and follow-
ing the gropings of his unconscious toward the
light. Some cases demand one method and some
another.

This is especially true when one seeks to in-
terpret symbols. Two different individuals may
have almost exactly the same dream. (This, as
one soon discovers in clinical experience, is less
uncommon than the layman may think.) Yet
if. for instance, one dreamer is young and the
other old, the problem that disturbs them is
correspondingly different, and it would be
obviously absurd to interpret both dreams in
the same way.

An example that comes to my mind is a
dream in which a group of young men are
riding on horseback across a wide field. The
dreamer is in the lead and he jumps a ditch
full of water, just clearing this hazard. The rest
of the party fall into the ditch. Now the young
man who first told me this dream was a
cautious, introverted type. But I also heard the
same dream from an old man of daring char-
acter, who had lived an active and enterprising
life. At the time he had this dream, he was an
invalid who gave his doctor and nurse a great
deal of trouble; he had actually injured him-
self bv his disobedience of medical instructions.

It was clear to me that this dream was telling
the voting man what he ought to do. But it was
telling the old man what he actually was still
doing. Whereas it encouraged the hesitant young
man. tin* old man was in no such need of en-
couragement; the spirit of enterprise that still
flickered within him was, indeed, his greatest
trouble. This example shows how the interpre-
tation of dreams and symbols largely depends
upon the individual circumstances of the
dreamer and the condition of his mind.

As this museum display shows, the
fetus of man resembles those of
other animals (and thus provides
an indication of man's physical
evolution). The psyche, too, has
"evolved"; and some contents of
modern man's unconscious resemble
products of the mind of ancient
man. Jung termed these products
archetypal images.

66

The archetype in dream symbolism

I have already suggested that dreams serve the
purpose of compensation. This assumption
means that the dream is a normal psychic phe-
nomenon that transmits unconscious reactions
or spontaneous impulses to consciousness. Many
dreams can he interpreted with the help of the
dreamer, who provides both the associations to
and the context of the dream image, by means
of which one can look at all its aspects.

This method is adequate in all ordinary
cases, such as those when a relative, a friend,
or a patient tells you a dream more or less in
the course of conversation. But when it is a
matter of obsessive dreaming or of highly emo-
tional dreams, the personal associations pro-
duced by the dreamer do not usually suffice for
a satisfactory interpretation. In such cases, we
have to take into consideration the fact (first
observed and commented on by Freud) that
elements often occur in a dream that are not
individual and that cannot be derived from
the dreamer’s personal experience. These ele-
ments, as I have previously mentioned, are what
Freud called “archaic remnants'’ mental
forms whose presence cannot be explained by
anything in the individual’s own life and which
seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited
shapes of the human mind.

Just as the human body represents a whole
museum of organs, each with a long evolution-
ary history behind it, so we should expect to
find that the mind is organized in a similar
way. It can no more be a product without his-
tory than is the body in which it exists. By
“history" I do not mean the fact that the mind
builds itself up by conscious reference to the
past through language and other cultural tradi-
tions. I am referring to the biological, prehis-
toric, and unconscious development of the mind
in archaic man, whose psyche was still close to
that of the animal.

This immensely old psyche forms the basis
of our mind, just as much as the structure of

our body is based on the general anatomical
pattern of the mammal. The trained eye of the
anatomist of the biologist finds many traces of
this original pattern in our bodies. The experi-
enced investigator of the mind can similarly see
the analogies between the dream pictures of
modern man and the products of the primitive
mind, its “collective images,’’ and its mytholo-
gical motifs.

Just as the biologist needs the science of com-
parative anatomy, however, the psychologist
cannot do without a “comparative anatomy of
the psyche." In practice, to put it differently,
the psychologist must have a sufficient experi-
ence not only of dreams and other products of
unconscious activity, but also of mythology in
its widest sense. Without this equipment, no-
body can spot the important analogies; it is not
possible, for instance, to see the analogy be-
tween a case of compulsion neurosis and that of
a classical demonic possession without a work-
ing knowledge of both.

My views about the “archaic remnants,”
which I call “archetypes” or “primordial
images,” have been constantly criticized by
people who lack a sufficient knowledge of the
psychology of dreams and of mythology. The
term “archetype" is often misunderstood as
meaning certain definite mythological images
or motifs. But these are nothing more than
conscious representations; it would be absurd
to assume that such variable representations
could be inherited.

The archetype is a tendency to form such
representations of a motif — representations that
can vary a great deal in detail without losing
their basic pattern. There are, for instance,
many representations of the motif of the hostile
brethren, but the motif itself remains the same.
My critics have incorrectly assumed that I am
dealing with “inherited representations,” and
on that ground they have dismissed the idea of
the archetype as mere superstition. They have

6 7

Man's unconscious archetypal images
are as instinctive as the ability
of geese to migrate (in formation) ;
as ants' forming organized societies;
as bees' tail-wagging dance (above)
that communicates to the hive the
exact location of a food source.

A modern professor had a "vision"
exactly like a woodcut in an old
book that he had never seen. Right,
the book's title page; and another
woodcut, symbolizing the male and
female principles united. Such
archetypal symbols arise from the
psyche's age-old collective basis.

68

failed to take into account the fact that if
archetypes were representations that originated
in our consciousness (or were acquired by con-
sciousness), we should surely understand them,
and not be bewildered and astonished when
they present themselves in our consciousness.
They are, indeed, an instinctive trend , as
marked as the impulse of birds to build nests,
or ants to form organized colonies.

Here I must clarify the relation between
instincts and archetypes : What we properly call
instincts are physiological urges, and are per-
ceived by the senses. But at the same time,
they also manifest themselves in fantasies and
often reveal their presence only by symbolic
images. These manifestations are what I call
the archetypes. They are without known origin ;
and they reproduce themselves in any time or
in any part of the world -even where trans-
mission by direct descent or “cross fertilization"
through migration must be ruled out.

I can remember many cases of' people who
have consulted me because they were baffled
by their own dreams or by their children's.
They were at a complete loss to understand the
terms of the dreams. The reason was that the
dreams contained images that they could not

relate to anything they could remember or
could have passed on to their children. Yet
some of these patients were highly educated : A
few of them were actually psychiatrists them-
selves.

I vividly recall the case of a professor who
had had a sudden vision and thought he was
insane. He came to see me in a state of com-
plete panic. I simply took a 400-vear-old book
from the shelf and showed him an old woodcut
depicting his very vision. “There's no reason for
you to believe that you're insane," I said to
him. “They knew about your vision 400 years
ago." Whereupon he sat dow n entirely deflated,
but once more normal.

A very important case came to me from a
man who was himself a psychiatrist. One day
he brought me a handwritten booklet he had
received as a Christmas present from his 10-
vear-old daughter. It contained a whole series
of dreams she had had when she was eight.
They made up the weirdest series of dreams
that I have ever seen, and I could well under-
stand w in the father was more than just puz-
zled by them. Though childlike, they were un-
canny. and thev contained images whose origin
was wholly incomprehensible to the father.

‘A R T' i S .

QV AM CHEMIAM

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Here arc the relevant motifs from the dreams:

1 . " The evil animal.” a snakelike monster with
main horns, kills and devours all other animals.
But (iod comes from the four corners, being in
fact four separate gods, and gives rebirth to all
tht* dead animals.

2. An ascent into heaven, where pagan dances
are being celebrated; and a descent into hell,
where angels are doing good deeds.

A A horde of small animals frightens the
dreamer. The animals increase to a tremendous
size, and one of them devours the little girl.

4. A small mouse is penetrated by worms,
snakes, fishes, and human beings. Thus the
mouse becomes human. This portrays the four
stages of the origin of mankind.

5. A drop of water is seen, as it appears when
looked at through a microscope. The girl sees
that the drop is full of tree branches. This por-
trays the origin of the world.

6. A bad bov has a clod of earth and throws

7 °

bits of it at everyone who passes. In this way
all the passers-by become bad.

7. A drunken woman falls into the water and
comes out renewed and sober.

8. The scene is in America, where many people
are rolling on an ant heap, attacked by the
ants. The dreamer, in a panic, falls into a river.

9. There is a desert on the moon where the
dreamer sinks so deeply into the ground that
she reaches hell.

10. In this dream the girl has a vision of a
luminous ball. She touches it. Vapors emanate
from it. A man comes and kills her.

1 1. The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Sud-
denly birds come out of her skin and cover her
completely.

12. Swarms of gnats obscure the sun. the moon,
and all the stars, except one. That one star falls
upon the dreamer.

In the unabridged German original, each
dream begins with the words of the old fairy

Parallels to archetypal motifs in
the girl's first dream (p 70) :

Left, from Strasbourg Cathedral,
Christ crucified on Adam s grave -
symbolizing the theme of rebirth
(Christ as the second Adam). In
a Navaho sand painting, above, the
horned heads are the four corners
of the world. In Britain's royal
coronation ceremony, the monarch
(right. Queen Elizabeth II in 1 953)
is presented to the people at the
four doors of Westminster Abbey.

talc: “Once upon a time. ..." By these words
the little dreamer suggests that she feels as if
each dream were a sort of fairy tale, which she
wants to t (‘1 1 her father as a Christmas present.
The father tried to explain the dreams in
terms of their context. But he could not do so,
for there seemed to he no personal associations
to them.

The possibility that these dreams were con-
scious elaborations can of course be ruled out
only by someone who knew the child well
enough to be absolutely sure of her truthfulness.
(They would, however, remain a challenge to
our understanding even if they were fantasies. )
In this case, the father was convinced that the
dreams were* authentic, and I have no reason to
doubt it I knew the little girl myself, but this
was before she gave her dreams to her fat Inn .
so that I had no chance to ask her about them.
She lived abroad and died of an infectious
disease about a year after that Christmas.

Her dreams have a decidedly peculiar char-
acter. Their leading thoughts are markedly
philosophic in concept. The first one, for
instance, speaks of an evil monster killing other
animals, but God gives rebirth to them all
through a divine Apokatastasis , or restitution.
In the Western world this idea is known
through the Christian tradition. It can be found
in the Acts of the Apostles in : 2 1 : “[Christ]
whom the heaven must receive until the time of
restitution of all things. . . .” The early Greek
Fathers of the Church (for instance, Origen)
particularly insisted upon the idea that, at the
end of time, everything will be restored by the
Redeemer to its original and perfect state. But,
according to St. Matthew xvn:ll, there was
already an old Jewish tradition that Elias “truly
shall first come, and restore all things.” I Corin-
thians xv:22 refers to the same idea in the
following words : “For as in Adam all die, even
so in Christ shall all be made alive.”

One might guess that the child had encoun-
tered this thought in her religious education.

But she had very little religious background.
Her parents were Protestants in name; but in
fact they knew the Bible only from hearsay. It
is particularly unlikely that the recondite image
of Apokatastasis had been fully explained to the
girl. Certainly her father had never heard of
this mythical idea.

Nine of the 12 dreams are influenced by the
theme of destruction and restoration. And none
of these dreams shows traces of specific Chris-
tian education or influence. On the contrary,
they are more closely related to primitive
myths. This relation is corroborated by the
other motif the “cosmogonic myth” (the cre-
ation of the world and of man) that appears in
the fourth and filth dreams. The same connec-
tion is found in I Corinthians xv:22, which I
have just quoted. In this passage too, Adam
and Christ (death and resurrection) are linked
together.

The general idea of Christ the Redeemer
belongs to the world-wide and pre-Christ theme
of the hero and rescuer who, although he has

Above, the hero-god Raven (of the
Haida Indians of America's Pacific
Coast) in the belly of a whale —
corresponding to the "devouring
monster" motif in the girl's first
dream (p. 70).

The girl's second dream — of angels
in hell and demons in heaven —
seems to embody the idea of the
relativity of morality. The same
concept is expressed in the dual
aspect of the fallen angel who is
both Satan, the devil, and (right)
Lucifer, the resplendent bringer
of light. These opposites can also
be seen in the figure of God, far
right (in a drawing by Blake): He
appears to Job, in a dream, with
a cloven hoof like a demon's.

7 2

been devoured by a monster, appears again in
a miraculous way, having overcome whatever
monster it was that swallowed him. When and
where such a motif originated nobody knows.
We do not even know how to go about investi-
gating the problem. The one apparent certainty
is that every generation seems to have known it
as a tradition handed down from some preced-
ing time. Thus we can safely assume that it
“originated” at a period when man did not yet
know that he possessed a hero myth ; in an age,
that is to say, when he did not yet consciously
reflect on what he was saying. The hero figure
is an archetype, which has existed since time
immemorial.

The production of archetypes by children is
especially significant, because one can some-
times be quite certain that a child has had no
direct access to the tradition concerned. In this
case, the girl’s family had no more than a
superficial acquaintance with the Christian tra-
dition. Christian themes may, of course, be
represented by such ideas as God, angels, hea-

ven, hell, and evil. But the way in which they
are treated by this child points to a totally
non-Christian origin.

Let us take the first dream of the God who
really consists of four gods, coming from the
“four corners.” The corners of what? There is
no room mentioned in the dream. A room
would not even fit in with the picture of what
is obviously a cosmic event, in which the Uni-
versal Being himself intervenes. The quaternity
(or element of “fourness”) itself is a strange
idea, but one that plays a great role in many
religions and philosophies. In the Christian re-
ligion, it has been superseded by the Trinity, a
notion that we must assume was known to the
child. But who in an ordinary middle-class
family of today would be likely to know of a
divine quaternity? It is an idea that was once
fairly familiar among students of the Hermetic
philosophy in the Middle Ages, but it petered
out with the beginning of the 18th century, and
it has been entirely obsolete for at least 200
years. Where, then, did the little girl pick it up?

\Vjtk Dreams upon my bed tkoa nearest me &c aflngktest me

with. Visions

73

From Ezekiel's vision? But there is no Christian
teaching that identifies the seraphim with God.

The same question may he asked about the
horned serpent. In the Bible, it is true, there
are many horned animals in the Book of
Revelation, for instance. But all these seem to
be quadruped, although their overlord is the
dragon, the Greek word for which ( drakon ) also
means serpent. The horned serpent appears in
16th-century Latin alchemy as the quadricor-
nutus serpens dour-horned serpent i, a symbol
of Mercury and an antagonist of the Christian
Trinity. But this is an obscure reference. So far
as I can discover, it is made by only one
author; and this child had no means of know-
ing it.

In the second dream, a motif appears that is
definitely non-Christian and that contains a re-
versal of accepted values for instance, pagan
dances by men in heaven and good deeds by
angels in hell. This symbol suggests a relativity
of moral values. Where did tin* child find such
a revolutionary notion, worthy of Nietzsche's
genius?

These questions lead us to another: What is
the compensatory meaning of these dreams, to
which the little girl obviously attributed so

much importance that she presented them to
her lather as a Christmas present?

If the dreamer had been a primitive medi-
cine man, one could reasonably assume that
they represent variations of the philosophical
themes of* death, of resurrection or restitution,
of the origin of the world, the creation of man,
and the relativity of* values. But one might give
up such dreams as hopelessly difficult if one
tried to interpret them from a personal level.
They undoubtedly contain “collective images,"
and they are in a way analogous to the doc-
trines taught to young people in primitive tribes
when they are about to be initiated as men. At
such times they learn about what God, or the
gods, or the "founding” animals have done,
how the world and man were created, how the
end of the world will come, and the meaning of
death. Is there any occasion when we, in Chris-
tian civilization, hand out similar instructions?
There is: in adolescence. But many people
begin to think again of things like this in old
age, at the approach of death.

'The little girl, as it happened, was in both
these situations. She was approaching puberty
and, at the saint* time, tin* end of her life. Little
or nothing in the symbolism of her dreams

The little girl's dreams (p 70)
contain symbols of creation, death,
and rebirth, which resemble the
teachings given to adolescents in
primitive initiation rituals. Left,
the end of a Navaho ceremony :

A girl, having become a woman,
goes into the desert to meditate

Death and rebirth symbolism also
appears in dreams at the end of
life, when the approach of death
casts a shadow before it. Right,
one of Goya's last paintings: The
strange creature, apparently a
dog, that emerges from the dark
can be interpreted as the artist's
foreshadowing of his death. In
many mythologies dogs appear as
guides to the land of the dead.

74

points to the beginning of a normal adult life,
but there are many allusions to destruction and
restoration. When I first read her dreams, in-
deed, I had the uncanny feeling that they sug-
gested impending disaster. The reason I felt
like that was the peculiar nature of the com-
pensation that I deduced from the symbolism.
It was the opposite of what one would expect
to find in the consciousness of a girl of that age.

These dreams open up a new and rather
terrifying aspect of life and death. One would
expect to find such images in an aging person
who looks back upon life, rather than to be
given them by a child who would normally be
looking forward. Their atmosphere recalls the
old Roman saying, ‘"Life is a short dream/’
rather than the joy and exuberance of its
springtime. For this child's life was like a
ver sacrum vovendum (vow of a vernal sacri-
fice j, as the Roman poet puts it. Experience
shows that the unknown approach of death
casts an adumbratio (an anticipatory shadow)
over the life and dreams of the victim. Even
the altar in Christian churches represents, on
the one hand, a tomb and, on the other, a place
of resurrection the transformation of death
into eternal life.

Such are the ideas that the dreams brought
home to the child. They were a preparation for
death, expressed through short stories, like the
tales told at primitive initiations or the Koans
of Zen Buddhism. This message is unlike the
orthodox Christian doctrine and more like
ancient primitive thought. It seems to have
originated outside historical tradition in the
long-forgotten psychic sources that, since pre-
historic times, have nourished philosophical and
religious speculation about life and death.

It was as if' future events were casting their
shadow back by arousing in the child certain
thought forms that, though normally dormant,
describe or accompany the approach of a fatal
issue. Although the specific shape in which they
express themselves is more or less personal, their
general pattern is collective. They are found
everywhere and at all times, just as animal
instincts vary a good deal in the different
species and yet serve the same general pur-
poses. We do not assume that each new-born
animal creates its own instincts as an individual
acquisition, and we must not suppose that
human individuals invent their specific human
ways with every new birth. Like the instincts,
the collective thought patterns of the human
mind are innate and inherited. They function,
when the occasion arises, in more or less the
same way in all of us.

Emotional manifestations, to which such
thought patterns belong, are recognizably the
same all over the earth. We can identify them
even in animals, and the animals themselves
understand one another in this respect, even
though they may belong to different species.
And what about insects, with their complicated
symbiotic functions? Most of them do not even
know their parents and have nobody to teach
them. Why should one assume, then, that man
is the only living being deprived of specific
instincts, or that his psyche is devoid of all
traces of its evolution?

Naturally, if you identify the psyche with
consciousness, you can easily fall into the erro-
neous idea that man comes into the world with
a psyche that is empty, and that in later years
it contains nothing more than what it has

75

learned by individual experience. But the
psyche is more than consciousness. Animals
have little consciousness, but many impulses
and reactions that denote the existence of a
psyche; and primitives do a lot of things whose
meaning is unknown to them.

You may ask many civilized people in vain
for the real meaning of the Christmas tree or
of the Easter egg. The fact is, they do things
without knowing why they do them. I am
inclined to the view that things were generally
done first and that it was only a long time
afterward that somebody asked why they were
done. The medical psychologist is constantly
confronted with otherwise intelligent patients
who behave in a peculiar and unpredictable
way and who have no inkling of what they say
or do. They are suddenly caught by unreason-
able moods for which they themselves cannot
account.

Superficially, such reactions and impulses
seem to be of an intimately personal nature,
and so we dismiss them as idiosyncratic be-
havior. In fact, they are based upon a pre-
formed and ever-readv instinctive system that is
characteristic of man. Thought forms, univer-
sally understandable gestures, and many atti-
tudes follow a pattern that was established long
before man developed a reflective consciousness.

It is even conceivable that the early origins
of man’s capacity to reflect come from the pain-
ful consequences of violent emotional clashes.
Let me take, purely as an illustration of this
point, the bushman who, in a moment of anger

and disappointment at his failure to catch any
fish, strangles his much beloved only son, and
is then seized with immense regret as he holds
the little dead body in his arms. Such a man
might remember this moment of pain for ever.

We cannot know whether this kind of experi-
ence was actually the initial cause of the de-
velopment of human consciotisness. But there
is no doubt that the shock of a similar emo-
tional experience is often needed to make
people wake up and pay attention to what they
are doing. There is a famous case of a 13 th-
century Spanish hidalgo, Raimon Lull, who fin-
ally (after a long chase) succeeded in meeting
the lady he admired at a secret rendezvous. She
silently opened her dress and showed him her
breast, rotten with cancer. The shock changed
Lull's life; he eventually became an eminent
theologian and one of the Church’s greatest
missionaries. In the case of such a sudden
change one can often prove that an archetype
has been at work for a long time in the uncon-
scious, skillfully arranging circumstances that
will lead to the crisis.

Such experiences seem to show that arche-
typal forms are not just static patterns. They
are dynamic factors that manifest themselves
in impulses, just as spontaneously as the in-
stincts. Certain dreams, visions, or thoughts can
suddenly appear; and however carefully one
investigates, one cannot find out what causes
them. This does not mean that they have no
cause; they certainly have. But it is so remote
or obscure that one cannot see what it is. In

Some dreams seem to predict the
future (perhaps due to unconscious
knowledge of future possibilities) ;
thus dreams were long used as
divination. In Greece the sick
would ask the healing god Asklepios
fora dream indicating a cure. Left,
a relief depicts such a dream cure:

A snake (the god s symbol) bites a
man's diseased shoulder and the
god (far left) heals the shoulder.
Right, Constantine (an Italian
painting c. 1 460) dreaming before a
battle that was to make him Roman
Emperor. He dreamed of the cross,
a symbol of Christ, and a voice
said: "In this sign conquer." He
took the sign as his emblem, won
the battle, and was thus
converted to Christianity

such a case, one must wait either until the
dream and its meaning are sufficiently under-
stood, or until some external event occurs that
will explain the dream.

At the moment of the dream, this event may
still lit' in the future. But just as our conscious
thoughts often occupy themselves with the
future and its possibilities, so do the unconscious
and its dreams. There has long been a general
belief that the chief f unction of dreams is pro-
gnostication of the future. In antiquity, and as
late as the Middle Ages, dreams played their
part in medical prognosis. I can confirm by a
modern dream the element of prognosis (or pre-
cognition) that can be found in an old dream
quoted by Artemidorus of Daldis, in the second
century A.n. A man dreamed that he saw his
father die in the flames of a house on fire. Not
long afterwards, he himself died in a phlegmon?
fire, or high fever , which 1 presume was
pneumonia.

It so happened that a colleague of mine was
mice suffering from a deadly gangrenous fever

in fact, a phlegmon?. A former patient of
his, who had no knowledge of the nature of his
doctor's illness, dreamed that the doctor died
in a great fire. At that time the doctor had
just entered a hospital and the disease was only
beginning. The dreamer knew nothing but the
bare fact that his doctor was ill and in a
hospital. Three weeks later, the doctor died.

As this example shows, dreams may have an
anticipatory or prognostic aspect, and anybody
trying to interpret them must take this into
consideration, especially where an obviously
meaningful dream does not provide a context

sufficient to explain it. Such a dream often
comes right out of the blue, and one wonders
w hat could have prompted it. Of course, ifone
knew r its ulterior message, its cause would be
clear. For it is only our consciousness that does
not yet know; the unconscious seems already
informed, and to have come to a conclusion
that is expressed in the dream. In fact, the un-
conscious seems to be able to examine and to
draw conclusions from facts, much as conscious-
ness does. It can even use certain facts, and
anticipate their possible results, just because we
are not conscious of them.

But as far as one can make out from dreams,
the unconscious makes its deliberations instinc-
tively. The distinction is important. Logical
analysis is the prerogative of consciousness; we
select with reason and knowledge. The uncon-
scious, however, seems to be guided chiefly by
instinctive trends, represented by corresponding
thought forms that is, by the archetypes. A
doctor who is asked to describe the course of
an illness will use such rational concepts as
"infection" or "fever." The dream is more
poetic. It presents the diseased body as a man's
earthly house, and the fever as the fire that is
destroying it.

As the above dream shows, the archetypal
mind has handled the situation in the same way
as it did in the time of Artemidorus. Something
that is of a more or less unknown nature has
been intuitively grasped by the unconscious and
submitted to an archetypal treatment. This sug-
gests that, instead of the process of' reasoning
that conscious thought would have applied, the
archetypal mind has stepped in and taken over

r

In a dream quoted from Artemidorus
on this page, a burning house
symbolizes a fever. The human body
is often represented as a house:

Left, from an 1 8th -century Hebrew
encyclopedia, the body and a house
are compared in detail -turrets as
ears, windows as eyes, a furnace
as stomach, etc. Right, in a cartoon
by James Thurber, a henpecked
husband sees hts home and his wife
as the same being

Maya.

iff

TS *J*P

the task of prognostication. The archetypes thus
have their own initiative and their own specific
energy. These powers enable them both to pro-
duce a meaningful interpretation ( in their ow n
symbolic style) and to interfere in a given situa-
tion with their own impulses and their own
thought formations. In this respect, they func-
tion like complexes; they come and go very
much as they please, and often they obstruct or
modify our conscious intentions in an embar-
rassing way.

We can perceive the specific energy of
archetypes when we experience the peculiar
fascination that accompanies them. They seem
to hold a special spell. Such a peculiar quality
is also characteristic of the personal complexes ;
and just as personal complexes have their indi-
vidual history, so do social complexes of an
archetypal character. But while personal com-
plexes never produce more than a personal bias,
archetypes create myths, religions, and philoso-
phies that influence and characterize whole
nations and epochs of history. We regard the
personal complexes as compensations for one-
sided or faulty attitudes of consciousness; in
the same way, myths of a religious nature can
be interpreted as a sort of mental therapy for
the sufferings and anxieties of mankind in
general hunger, war, disease, old age, death.

'fhc universal hero myth, for example,
always refers to a powerful man or god-man
who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons,
serpents, monsters, demons, and so on, and who
liberates his people from destruction and death.
The narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts
and ceremonies, and the worship of such a

figure with dances, music, hymns, prayers, and
sacrifices, grip the audience w r ith numinous
emotions (as if with magic spells) and exalt the
indiv idual to an identification with the hero.

If we try to see such a situation with the
eyes of a believer, we can perhaps understand
how the ordinary man can be liberated from
his personal impotence and misery and en-
dowed fat least temporarily) with an almost
superhuman quality. Often enough such a con-
viction will sustain him for a long time and
give a certain style to his life. It may even set
the tone of a whole society. A remarkable
instance of this can be found in the Eleusinian
mysteries, w hich were finally suppressed at the
beginning of the seventh century of the Chris-
tian era. They expressed, together with the
Delphic oracle, the essence and spirit of ancient
(ireece. On a much greater scale, the Christian
era itself' owes its name and significance to the
antique mystery of the god-man, w hich has its
roots in the archetypal Osiris-Horus myth of
ancient Egypt.

It is commonly assumed that on some given
occasion in prehistoric times, the basic* mytho-
logical ideas were “invented" by a clever old
philosopher or prophet, and ever afterward
“believed" by a credulous and uncritical
people. It is said that stories told by a power-
seeking priesthood are not “true," but merely
"wishful thinking." But the very word “invent"
is derived from the Latin invenire , and means
to "find” and hence to find something by "seek-
ing" it. In the latter case the word itself' hints
at some foreknow ledge of what you are going
to find.

The energy of archetypes can be
focused (through rituals and other
appeals to mass emotion) to move
people to collective action. The
Nazis knew this, and used versions
of Teutonic myths to help rally
the country to their cause. Far right,
a propaganda painting of Hitler as
a heroic crusader; right, a solstice
festival celebrated in summer by
the Hitler Youth, a revival of an
ancient pagan festival

Top, a child's painting of Christmas
includes the familiar tree decorated
with candles. The evergreen tree is
connected with Christ through the
symbolism of the winter solstice
and the "new year" (the new aeon of
Christianity). There are many links
between Christ and the tree symbol :
The cross is often seen as a tree,
as in a medieval Italian fresco,
left, of Christ crucified on the tree
of knowledge. Candles in Christian
ceremonies symbolize divine light, as
in the Swedish festival of St. Lucia
(above), where girls wear crowns of
burning candles.

8o

Let me go back to the strange ideas con-
tained in the dreams of the little girl. It seems
unlikely that she sought them out, since she was
surprised to find them. They occurred to her
rather as peculiar and unexpected stories, which
seemed noteworthy enough to be given to her
father as a Christmas present. In doing so, how-
ever, she lifted them up into the sphere of our
still living Christian mystery — the birth of our
Lord, mixed with the secret of the evergreen
tree that carries the new-born Light. (This is
the reference of the fifth dream.)

Although there is ample historical evidence
for the symbolic relation between Christ and
the tree symbol, the little girl’s parents would
have been gravely embarrassed had they been
asked to explain exactly what they meant by
decorating a tree with burning candles to cele-
brate the nativity of Christ. “Oh, it’s just a
Christmas custom!” they would have said. A
serious answer would require a far-reaching
dissertation about the antique symbolism of the
dying god, and its relation to the cult of the
Great Mother and her symbol, the tree — to
mention only one aspect of this complicated
problem. ■. /

The further we delve into the origins of a
“collective image” (or, to express it in ecclesi-
astical language, of a dogma), the more we un-
cover a seemingly unending web of archetypal
patterns that, before modern times, were never
the object of conscious reflection. Thus, para-
doxically enough, we know more about mytho-
logical symbolism than did any generation
before our own. The fact is that in former times
men did not reflect upon their symbols; they
lived them and were unconsciously animated by
their meaning.

I will illustrate this by an experience I once
had with the primitives of Mount Elgon in
Africa. Every morning at dawn, they leave their
huts and breathe or spit into their hands, which
they then stretch out to the first rays of the sun,
as if they were offering either their breath or
their spittle to the rising god — to mungu. (This
Swahili word, which they used in explaining
the ritual act, is derived from a Polynesian root
equivalent to mana or mulungu. These and

similar terms designate a “power” of extra-
ordinary efficiency and pervasiveness, which we
should call divine. Thus the word mungu is
their equivalent for Allah or God.) When I
asked them what they meant by this act, or
why they did it, they were completely baffled.
They could only say: “We have always done
it. It has always been done when the sun rises.”
They laughed at the obvious conclusion that
the sun is mungu. The sun indeed is not mungu
when it is above the horizon ; mungu is the actual
moment of the sunrise.

What they were doing was obvious to me,
but not to them; they just did it, never reflect-
ing on what they did. They were consequently
unable to explain themselves. I concluded that
they were offering their souls to mungu , be-
cause the breath (of life) and the spittle mean
“soul-substance.” To breathe or spit upon
something conveys a “magical” effect, as, for
instance, when Christ used spittle to cure the
blind, or where a son inhales his dying father’s
last breath in order to take over the father’s
soul. It is most unlikely that these Africans ever,
even in the remote past, knew any more about
the meaning of their ceremony. In fact, their
ancestors probably knew even less, because they
were even more profoundly unconscious of their
motives and thought less about their doings..

Goethe’s Faust aptly says: “/m Anfang war
die Tat [In the beginning was the deed].”
“Deeds” were never invented, they were done;
thoughts, on the other hand, are a relatively
late discovery of man. First he was moved to
deeds by unconscious factors; it was only a long
time afterward that he began to reflect upon
the causes that had moved him; and it took
him a very long time indeed to arrive at the
preposterous idea that he must have moved
himself — his mind being unable to identify any
other motivating force than his own.

We should laugh at the idea of a plant or an
animal inventing itself, yet there are many
people who believe that the psyche or mind
invented itself and thus was the creator of its
own existence. As a matter of fact, the mind
has grown to its present state of consciousness
as an acorn grows into an oak or as saurians

81

developed into mammals. As it has for so long
been developing, so it still develops, and thus
we are moved by forces from within as well as
by stimuli from without.

These inner motives spring from a deep
source that is not made by consciousness and is
not under its control. In the mythology of
earlier times, these forces were called mana , or
spirits, demons, and gods. They are as active
today as they ever were. If they conform to our
wishes, we call them happy hunches or impulses
and pat ourselves on the back for being smart
fellows. If they go against us, then we say that
it is just bad luck, or that certain people are
against us, or that the cause of our misfortunes
must be pathological. The one thing we refuse
to admit is that we are dependent upon
“powers” that are beyond our control.

It is true, however, that in recent times civil-
ized man has acquired a certain amount of will
power, which he can apply where he pleases.
He has learned to do his work efficiently with-
out having recourse to chanting and drumming
to hypnotize him into the state of doing. He
can even dispense with a daily prayer for divine
aid. He can carry out what he proposes to do,
and he can apparently translate his ideas into

action without a hitch, whereas the primitive
seems to be hampered at each step by fears,
superstitions, and other unseen obstacles to
action. The motto “Where there’s a will, there’s
a way” is the superstition of modern man.

Yet in order to sustain his creed, contem-
porary man pays the price in a remarkable lack
of introspection. He is blind to the fact that,
with all his rationality and efficiency, he is
possessed by “powers” that are beyond his con-
trol. His gods and demons have not disappeared
at all; they have merely got new names. They
keep him on the run with restlessness, vague
apprehensions, psychological complications, an
insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food
and, above all, a large array of neuroses.

Two examples of belief in the
"magical" quality of breath: Below
left, a Zulu witch doctor cures a
patient by blowing into his ear
through a cow's horn (to drive the
spirits out); below, a medieval
painting of the creation depicts
God breathing life into Adam. Right,
in a 1 3th-century Italian painting,

Christ heals a blind man with
spittle — which, like breath, has
long been believed to have a life-
giving ability.

The soul of man

What we call civilized consciousness has steadily
separated itself from the basic instincts. But
these instincts have not disappeared. They have
merely lost their contact with our consciousness
and are thus forced to assert themselves in an
indirect fashion. This may be by means of
physical symptoms in the case of a neurosis, or
by means of incidents of various kinds, such as
unaccountable moods, unexpected forgetful-
ness, or mistakes in speech.

A man likes to believe that he is the master
of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control
his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of
the myriad secret ways in which unconscious
factors insinuate themselves into his arrange-
ments and decisions, he is certainly not his own
master. These unconscious factors owe their
existence to the autonomy of the archetypes.
Modern man protects himself against seeing his
own split state by a system of compartments.
Certain areas of outer life and of his own
behavior are kept, as it were, in separate

drawers and are never confronted with one
another.

As an example of this so-called compartment
psychology, 1 remember the case of an alcoholic
who had come under the laudable influence of
a certain religious movement, and, fascinated
by its enthusiasm, had forgotten that he needed
a drink. He was obviously and miraculously
cured by Jesus, and he was correspondingly
displayed as a witness to divine grace or to the
efficiency of the said religious organization. But
after a few weeks of public confessions, the
novelty began to pale and some alcoholic re-
freshment seemed to be indicated, and so he
drank again. But this time the helpful organ-
ization came to the conclusion that the case was
“pathological" and obviously not suitable for
an interv ention by Jesus, so they put him into
a clinic to let the doctor do better than the
divine healer.

This is an aspect of the modern “cultural"
mind that is worth looking into. It shows an

8 '

alarming degree of dissociation and psycho-
logical confusion.

If, for a moment, we regard mankind as one
individual, we see that the human race is like
a person carried away by unconscious powers ;
and the human race also likes to keep certain
problems tucked away in separate drawers. But
this is why we should give a great deal of con-
sideration to what we are doing, for mankind
is now threatened by self-created and deadly
dangers that are growing beyond our control.
Our world is, so to speak, dissociated like a
neurotic, with the Iron Curtain marking the
symbolic line of division. Western man, becom-
ing aware of the aggressive will to power of
the East, sees himself forced to take extraordin-
ary measures of defense, at the same time as
he prides himself on his virtue and good
intentions.

What he fails to see is that it is his own vices,
which he has covered up by good international
manners, that are thrown back in his face by
the communist world, shamelessly and meth-
odically. What the West has tolerated, but
secretly and with a slight sense of shame (the
diplomatic lie, systematic deception, veiled
threats), comes back into the open and in full
measure from the East and ties us up in neu-
rotic knots. It is the face of his own evil shadow
that grins at Western man from the other side
of the Iron Curtain.

It is this state of affairs that explains the
peculiar feeling of helplessness of so many
people in Western societies. They have begun
to realize that the difficulties confronting us are
moral problems, and that the attempts to
answer them by a policy of piling up nuclear
arms or by economic “competition 5 5 is achiev-
ing little, for it cuts both ways. Many of us
now understand that moral and mental means
would be more efficient, since they could pro-
vide us with psychic immunity against the ever-
increasing infection.

'Our world is dissociated like a
neurotic.” Left, the Berlin Wall.

But all such attempts have proved singularly
ineffective, and will do so as long as we try to
convince ourselves and the world that it is only
they (i.e. our opponents) who are wrong. It
would be much more to the point for us to
make a serious attempt to recognize our own
shadow and its nefarious doings. If we could
see our shadow (the dark side of our nature),
we should be immune to any moral and mental
infection and insinuation. As matters now
stand, we lay ourselves open to every infection,
because we are really doing practically the
same thing as they. Only we have the addi-
tional disadvantage that we neither see nor
want to understand what we ourselves are
doing, under the cover of good manners.

The communist world, it may be noted, has
one big myth (which we call an illusion, in
the vain hope that our superior judgment will
make it disappear). It is the time-hallowed
archetypal dream of a Golden Age (or Para-
dise), where everything is provided in abund-
ance for everyone, and a great, just, and wise
chief rules over a human kindergarten. This
powerful archetype in its infantile form has
gripped them, but it will never disappear from
the world at the mere sight of our superior
point of view. We even support it by our own
childishness, for our Western civilization is in
the grip of the same mythology. Unconsciously,
we cherish the same prejudices, hopes, and
expectations. We too believe in the welfare
state, in universal peace, in the equality of man,
in his eternal human rights, in justice, truth,
and (do not say it too loudly) in the Kingdom
of God on Earth.

The sad truth is that man’s real life consists
of a complex of inexorable opposites — day and
night, birth and death, happiness and misery,
good and evil. We are not even sure that one
will prevail against the other, that good will
overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a
battleground. It always has been, and always
will be; and if it were not so, existence would
come to an end.

It was precisely this conflict within man that
led the early Christians to expect and hope for
an early end to this world, or the Buddhists to

85

Every society has its idea of the
archetypal paradise or golden age
that, it is believed, once existed
and will exist again. Left, a 1 9th-
century American painting embodies
the idea of a past utopia: It shows
William Penn's treaty with the
Indians in 1 682 occurring in an ideal
setting where all is harmony and
peace. Below left, a reflection of
the idea of a utopia yet to come:

A poster in a Moscow park shows
Lenin leading the Russian people
toward the future

Above, the Garden of Eden, depicted
as a walled (and womb-like) garden
in a 1 5th -century «French painting
and showing the expulsion of Adam
and Eve. Right, a "golden age'' of
primitive naturalness is pictured
in a 1 6th-century painting by
Cranach (entitled Earthly Paradise).
Far right, the 1 6th-century Flemish
artist Brueghel's Land of Cokaygne,
a mythical land of sensual delights
and easy living*(stories of which
were widely popular in medieval
Europe, especially among the hard-
working peasants and serfs).

reject all earthly desires and aspirations. These
basic answers would be frankly suicidal if they
were not linked up with peculiar mental and
moral ideas and practices that constitute the
bulk of both religions and that, to a certain
extent, modify their radical denial of the world.

I stress this point because, in our time, there
are millions of people who have lost faith in
any kind of religion. Such people do not under-
stand their religion any longer. While life runs
smoothly without religion, the loss remains as
good as unnoticed. But when suffering comes,
it is another matter. That is when people begin
to seek a way out and to reflect about the
meaning of life and its bewildering and painful
experiences.

It is significant that the psychological doctor
(within my experience) is consulted more by
Jews and Protestants than by Catholics. This
might be expected, for the Catholic Church
still feels responsible for the cur a ammarum
(the care and welfare of souls). But in this
scientific age, the psychiatrist is apt to be asked
the questions that once belonged in the domain
of the theologian. People feel that it makes, or
would make, a great difference if only they had
a positive belief in a meaningful way oflife or
in God and immortality. The specter of ap-
proaching death often gives a powerful incen-
tive to such thoughts. From time immemorial,
men have had ideas about a Supreme Being
(one or several) and about the Land of the

Hereafter. Only today do they think they can
do without such ideas.

Because we cannot discover God's throne in
the sky with a radio telescope or establish (for
certain) that a beloved father or mother is still
about in a more or less corporeal form, people
assume that such ideas are “not true.” I
would rather say that they are not “true”
enough , for these are conceptions of a kind
that have accompanied human life from pre-
historic times, and that still break through
into consciousness at any provocation.

Modern man may assert that he can
dispense with them, and he may bolster his
opinion by insisting that there is no scientific
evidence of their truth. Or he may even
regret the loss of his convictions. But since we
are dealing with invisible and unknowable
things (for God is beyond human understand-
ing, and there is no means of proving immor-
tality), why should we bother about evidence?
Even if we did not know by reason our need
for salt in our food, we should nonetheless
profit from its use. We might argue that the
use of salt is a mere illusion of taste or a
superstition; but it would still contribute to
our well-being. Why, then, should we deprive
ourselves of views that would prove helpful in
crises and would give a meaning to our
existence?

And how do we know that such ideas ar£
not true? Many people would agree with me

87

if I stated flatly that such ideas are probably
illusions. What they fail to realize is that the
denial is as impossible to "‘prove" as the
assertion of religious belief. We are entirely
free to choose which point of view we take;
it will in any case be an arbitrary decision.

There is, however, a strong empirical reason
why we should cultivate thoughts that can
never be proved. It is that they are known to
be useful. Man positively needs general ideas
and convictions that will give a meaning to
his life and enable him to find a place for
himself in the universe. He can stand the most
incredible hardships when he is convinced that
they make sense; he is crushed when, on top
of all his misfortunes, he has to admit that he
is taking part in a “tale told by an idiot/'

It is the role of religious symbols to give a
meaning to the life of man. The Pueblo
Indians believe that they are the sons of
Father Sun, and this belief endows their life
with a perspective (and a goal) that goes far
beyond their limited existence. It gives them
ample space for the unfolding of personality
and permits them a full life as complete
persons. Their plight is infinitely more satis-
factory than that of a man in our own civiliza-
tion who knows that he is (and will remain)
nothing more than an underdog with no inner
meaning to his life.

A sense of a wider meaning to one's exist-
ence is what raises a man beyond mere getting
and spending. If he lacks this sense, he is
lost and miserable. Had St. Paul been con-
vinced that he was nothing more than a

Left, the burial coffin of a South
American Cayapas Indian. The dead
man is provided with food and
clothing for his life after death
Religious symbols and beliefs of every
kind give meaning to men's lives
ancient peoples grieved over death
(right, an Egyptian figurine
representing mourning, which was
found in a tomb) ; yet their beliefs
made them also think of death as a
positive transformation.

wandering tent-maker he certainly would
not have been the man he was. His real
and meaningful life lay in the inner certainty
that he was the messenger of the Lord. One
may accuse him of suffering from megalo-
mania, but this opinion pales before the testi-
mony of history and the judgment of sub-
sequent generations. The myth that took
possession of him made him something greater
than a mere craftsman.

Such a myth, however, consists of symbols
that have not been invented consciously. They
have happened. It was not the man Jesus
who created the myth of the god-man. It
existed for many centuries before his birth.
He himself was seized by this symbolic idea,
which, as St. Mark tells us, lifted him out of
the narrow life of the Nazarene carpenter.

Myths go back to the primitive storyteller
and his dreams, to men moved by the stirring
of their fantasies. These people were not very
different from those whom later generations
have called poets or philosophers. Primitive
storytellers did not concern themselves with
the origin of their fantasies; it was very muc h
later that people began to wonder where a
story originated. Yet, centuries ago, in what
we now call ‘'ancient" Greece, men's minds
were advanced enough to surmise that the
tales of the gods were nothing but archaic
and exaggerated traditions of long-buried kings
or chieftains. Men already took the view that
the myth was too improbable to mean what it
said. They therefore tried to reduce it to a
generally understandable form.

In more recent times, we have seen the same
thing happen with dream symbolism. We
became aware, in the years when psychology
was in its infancy, that dreams had some
importance. But just as the Greeks persuaded
themselves that their myths were merely elab-
orations of rational or “normal" history, so
some of the pioneers of psychology came to the
conclusion that dreams did not mean what they
appeared to mean. The images or symbols that
they presented were dismissed as bizarre forms
in which repressed contents of the psyche
appeared to the conscious mind. It thus came
to be taken for granted that a dream meant
something other than its obvious statement.

I have already described my disagreement
with this idea — a disagreement that led me
to study the form as well as the content of
dreams. Why should they mean something
different from their contents? Is there any-
thing in nature that is other than it is? The
dream is a normal and natural phenomenon,
and it does not mean something it is not. The
Talmud even says: "The dream is its own
interpretation/’ The confusion arises because
the dream’s contents are symbolic and thus
have more than one meaning. The symbols
point in different directions from those we
apprehend with the conscious mind ; and there-
fore they relate to something either unconscious
or at least not entirely conscious.

Above, a child's drawing of a tree
(with the sun above it) A tree is
one of the best examples of a motif
that often appears in dreams (and
elsewhere) and that can have an
incredible variety of meanings. It
might symbolize evolution, physical
growth, or psychological maturation;
it might symbolize sacrifice or
death (Christ's crucifixion on the
tree); it might be a phallic symbol;
it might be a great deal more And
such other common dream motifs
as the cross (right) or the lingam
(far right) can also have a vast
array of symbolic meanings.

90

To the scientific mind, such phenomena as
symbolic ideas are a nuisance because they
cannot be formulated in a way that is satis-
factory to intellect and logic. They are by no
means the only case of this kind in psychology.
The trouble begins with the phenomenon of
“affect'' or emotion, which evades all the
attempts of the psychologist to pin it down
with a final definition. The cause of the dilli-
culty is the same in both cases — the interven-
tion of the unconscious.

I know enough of the scientific point of
view to understand that it is most annoying to
have to deal with facts that cannot be com-
pletely or adequately grasped. The trouble w ith
these phenomena is that the facts are un-
deniable and yet cannot be formulated in
intellectual terms. For this one would have to be
able to comprehend life itself, for it is life that
produces emotions and symbolic ideas.

The academic psychologist is perfectly free
to dismiss the phenomenon of emotion or the
concept of the unconscious (or both ) from his
consideration. Yet they remain facts to which
the medical psychologist at least has to pay
due attention; for emotional conflicts and the
intervention of the unconscious are the classical
features of his science. II he treats a patient at
all, he comes up against these irrationalities as

hard facts, irrespective of his ability to formu-
late them in intellectual terms, li is. therefore,
quite natural that people who have not had the
medical psychologist's experience find it diffi-
cult to follow what happens when psychology
ceases to be a tranquil pursuit for the scientist
in his laboratory and becomes an active part
of the adventure of real life. Target practice
on a shooting range is far from the battlefield;
the doctor has to deal with casualties in a
genuine war. He must concern himself with
psychic realities, even if' he cannot embody
them in scientific definitions. That is why no
textbook can teach psychology; one learns only
by actual experience.

YVe can see this point clearly when we
examine certain well-known symbols:

The cross in the Christian religion, for in-
stance, is a meaningful symbol that expresses
a multitude of aspects, ideas, and emotions;
but a cross after a name on a list simply indi-
cates that the individual is dead. The phallus
functions as an all-embracing symbol in the
Hindu religion, but if' a street urchin draw's
one on a wall, it just reflects an interest in his
penis. Because infantile and adolescent fan-
tasies often continue far into adult life, many
dreams occur in which there are unmistakable
sexual allusions. It would be absurd to under-

9 1

stand them as anything else. But when a mason
speaks of monks and nuns to be laid upon
each other, or an electrician of male plugs and
female sockets, it would be ludicrous to
suppose that he is indulging in glowing adoles-
cent fantasies. He is simply using colorful
descriptive names for his materials. When an
educated Hindu talks to you about the lin-
gam (the phallus that represents the god Siva
in Hindu mythology), you will hear things
we Westerners would never connect with the
penis. The lingam is certainly not an obscene
allusion; nor is the cross merely a sign of
death. Much depends upon the maturity of
the dreamer who produces such an image.

The interpretation of dreams and symbols
demands intelligence. It cannot be turned into
a mechanical system and then crammed into
unimaginative brains. It demands both an
increasing knowledge of the dreamer’s indi-
viduality and an increasing self-awareness
on the part of the interpreter. No experienced
worker in this field will deny that there are
rules of thumb that can prove helpful, but they
must be applied with prudence and intelligence.
One may follow all the right rules and yet get
bogged down in the most appalling nonsense,
simply by overlooking a seemingly unimportant
detail that a better intelligence would not have
missed. Even a man of high intellect can go
badly astray for lack of intuition or feeling.

When we attempt to understand symbols,
we are not only confronted with the symbol
itself, but we are brought up against the
wholeness of the symbol-producing individual.
This includes a study of his cultural back-
ground, and in the process one fills in many
gaps in one’s own education. I have made it
a rule myself to consider every case as an
entirely new proposition about which I do
not even know the ABC. Routine responses
may be practical and useful while one is deal-
ing with the surface, but as soon as one gets
in touch with the vital problems, life itself
takes over and even the most brilliant theoreti-
cal premises become ineffectual words.

Imagination and intuition are vital to our
understanding. And though the usual popular

opinion is that they are chiefly valuable to
poets and artists (that in “sensible” matters one
should mistrust them), they are in fact equally
vital in all the higher grades of science. Here
they play an increasingly important role, which
supplements that of the “rational” intellect and
its application to a specific problem. Even
physics, the strictest of all applied sciences,
depends to an astonishing degree upon intui-
tion, which works by way of the unconscious
(although it is possible to demonstrate after-
ward the logical procedures that could have
led one to the same result as intuition).

Intuition is almost indispensable in the in-
terpretation of symbols, and it can often ensure
that they are immediately understood by the
dreamer. But while such a lucky hunch may be
subjectively convincing, it can also be rather
dangerous. It can so easily lead to a false
feeling of security. It may, for instance, seduce
both the interpreter and the dreamer into
continuing a cosy and relatively easy relation,
which may end in a sort of shared dream.
The safe basis of real intellectual knowledge
and moral understanding gets lost if one is
content with the vague satisfaction of having
understood by “hunch.” One can explain and
know only if one has reduced intuitions to an
exact knowledge of facts and their logical
connections.

An honest investigator will have to admit
that he cannot always do this, but it would
be dishonest not to keep it always in mind.
Even a scientist is a human being. So it is
natural for him, like others, to hate the things
he cannot explain. It is a common illusion to
believe that what we know today is all we
ever can know. Nothing is more vulnerable
than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral
attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting
truth in itself.

Ancient mythological beings are
now curiosities in museums (right).

But the archetypes they expressed
have not lost their power to affect
men's minds. Perhaps the monsters
of modern "horror” films (far right)
are distorted versions of archetypes
that will no longer be repressed.

9 2

The role of symbols

When the medical psychologist takes an inter-
est in symbols, he is primarily concerned with
“natural" symbols, as distinct from “cultural"
symbols. The former are derived from the
unconscious contents of the psyche, and they
therefore represent an enormous number of
variations on the essential archetypal images.
In many cases they can still be traced back

I to their archaic roots - i.e. to ideas and images
that we meet in the most ancient records and
in primitive societies. The cultural symbols, on
the other hand, are those that have been
used to express “eternal truths," and that are
still used in many religions. They have gone
through many transformations and even a long
process of more or less conscious development,
and have thus become collective images
accepted by civilized societies.

Such cultural symbols nevertheless retain
much of their original numinosity or “spell.''
One is aware that they can evoke a deep emo-
tional response in some individuals, and this
psychic change makes them function in much
the same way as prejudices. They are a factor
with which the psychologist must reckon; it is
folly to dismiss them because, in rational terms,
they seem to be absurd or irrelevant. They are
important constituents of our mental make-up

and vital forces in the building up of human
society; and they cannot be eradicated without
serious loss. Where they are repressed or neg-
lected, their specific energy disappears into the
unconscious with unaccountable consequences.
The psychic energy that appears to have been
lost in this way in fact serves to revive and in-
tensify whatever is uppermost in the uncon-
scious-tendencies, perhaps, that have hitherto
had no chance to express themselves or at least
have not been allowed an uninhibited existence
in our consciousness.

Such tendencies form an ever-present and
potentially destructive “shadow" to our con-
scious mind. Even tendencies that might in
some circumstances be able to exert a beneficial
influence are transformed into demons when
they are repressed. This is why many well-
meaning people are understandably afraid of
the unconscious, and incidentally ofpsychology.

Our times have demonstrated what it means
for the gates of the underworld to be opened.
Things whose enormity nobody could have
imagined in the idyllic harmlessness of the first
decade of our century have happened and have
turned our world upside down. Ever since, the
world has remained in a state of schizophrenia.
Not only has civilized Germany disgorged its

93

terrible primitivity, but Russia is also ruled by
it, and Africa has been set on fire. No wonder
that the Western world feels uneasy.

Modern man does not understand how much
his “rationalism" (which has destroyed his capa-
city to respond to numinous symbols and ideas)
has put him at the mercy of the psychic
“underworld." He has freed himself from
“superstition" (or so he believes), but in the pro-
cess he has lost his spiritual values to a positively
dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradi-
tion has disintegrated, and he is now paying
the price for this break-up in world- wide dis-
orientation and dissociation.

Anthropologists have often described what
happens to a primitive society when its spiritual
values are exposed to the impact of modern
civilization. Its people lose the meaning of their
lives, theirsocial organization disintegrates, and
they themselves morally decay. We are now in
the same condition. But we have never really
understood what we have lost, for our spiritual
leaders unfortunately were more interested in
protecting their institutions than in understand-
ing the mystery that symbols present. In my
opinion, faith does not exclude thought (which

is man's strongest weapon), but unfortunately
many believers seem to be so afraid of science
(and incidentally of psychology that they turn
a blind eye to the numinous psychic powers
that forever control man's fate. We have strip-
ped all things of their mystery and numinosity ;
nothing is holy any longer.

In earlier ages, as instinctive concepts welled
up in the mind of man, his conscious mind
could no doubt integrate them into a coherent
psychic pattern. But the "civilized" man is no
longer able to do this. His “advanced" con-
sciousness has deprived itself of the means by
which the auxiliary contributions of the in-
stincts and the unconscious can be assimilated.
These organs of assimilation and integration
were numinous symbols, held holy by common
consent.

Today, for instance, we talk of “matter." We
describe its physical properties. We conduct
laboratory experiments to demonstrate some of
its aspects. But the word "matter" remains a
dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept,
without any psychic significance for us. How
different was the former image of matter the
Great Mother that could encompass and ex-

press the profound emotional meaning of
Mother Earth. In the same way, what was the
spirit is now identified with intellect and thus
ceases to be the Father of All. It has degen-
erated to the limited ego-thoughts of man; the
immense emotional energy expressed in the
image of “our Father” vanishes into the sand
of an intellectual desert.

These two archetypal principles lie at the
foundation of the contrasting systems of East
and West. The masses and their leaders do not
realize, however, that there is no substantial
difference between calling the world principle
male and a father (spirit), as the West does, or
female and a mother (matter), as the Com-
munists do. Essentially, we know as little of the
one as of the other. In earlier times, these prin-
ciples were worshiped in all sorts of rituals,
which at least showed the psychic significance
they held for man. But now they have become
mere abstract concepts.

As scientific understanding has grown, so our
world has become dehumanized. Man feels him-
self isolated in the cosmos, because he is no
longer involved in nature and has lost his emo-
tional “unconscious identity” with natural phe-
nomena. These have slowly lost their symbolic
implications. Thunder is no longer the voice of
an angry god, nor is lightning his avenging
missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree is
the life principle of a man, no snake the embodi-
ment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home
of a great demon. No voices now speak to
man from stones, plants, and animals, nor does
he speak to them believing they can hear. His
contact with nature has gone, and with it has
gone the profound emotional energy that this
symbolic connection supplied.

Repressed unconscious contents can
erupt destructively in the form of
negative emotions -as in World War
II Far left, Jewish prisoners in
Warsaw after the 1 943 uprising;
left, footwear of the dead stacked
at Auschwitz

Right, Australian aborigines who
have disintegrated since they lost
their religious beliefs through
contact with civilization This tribe
now numbers only a few hundred.

This enormous loss is compensated for by
the symbols of our dreams. They bring up our
original nature its instincts and peculiar
thinking. Unfortunately, however, they express
their contents in the language of nature, which
is strange and incomprehensible to us. It there-
fore confronts us with the task of translating it
into the rational words and concepts of modern
speech, which has liberated itself from its primi-
tive encumbrances notably from its mystical
participation with the things it describes. Now-
adays, when we talk of ghosts and other numi-
nous figures, we are no longer conjuring them
up. The power as well as the glory is drained
out of such once-potcnt words. We have ceased
to believe in magic formulas; not many taboos
and similar restrictions arc left; and our world
seems to be disinfected of' all such "supersti-
tious" minima as “witches, warlocks, and wor-
ricows,” to say nothing ofwcrewolves, vampires,
bush souls, and all the other bizarre beings that
populated the primeval forest.

To be more accurate, the surface of our
world seems to be cleansed of all superstitious
and irrational elements. Whether, however, the
real inner human world (not our wish-fulfilling

95

fiction about it) is also freed from primitivity
is another question. Is the number 13 not still
taboo for many people? Are there not still
many individuals possessed by irrational preju-
dices, projections, and childish illusions? A rea-
listic picture of the human mind reveals many
such primitive traits and survivals, which are
still playing their roles just as if nothing had
happened during the last 500 years.

It is essential to appreciate this point. Modern
man is in fact a curious mixture of characteris-
tics acquired over the long ages of his mental
development. This mixed-up being is the man
and his symbols that we have to deal with, and
we must scrutinize his mental products very
carefully indeed. Skepticism and scientific con-
viction exist in him side by side with old-fash-
ioned prejudices, outdated habits of thought
and feeling, obstinate misinterpretations, and
blind ignorance.

Such are the contemporary human beings
who produce the symbols we psychologists in-
vestigate. In order to explain these symbols
and their meaning, it is vital to learn whether
their representations are related to purely per-
sonal experience, or whether they have been
chosen by a dream for its particular purpose
from a store of general conscious knowledge.

Take, for instance, a dream in which the
number 13 occurs. The question is whether the
dreamer himself habitually believes in the un-
lucky quality of the number, or whether the
dream merely alludes to people who still in-
dulge in such superstitions. The answer makes
a great difference to the interpretation. In the
former case, you have to reckon with the fact
that the individual is still under the spell of the
unlucky 13, and therefore will feel most un-
comfortable in Room 13 in a hotel or sitting
at a table with 13 people. In the latter case, 13
may not mean any more than a discourteous or
abusive remark. The “superstitious” dreamer
still feels the “spell” of 13 ; the more “rational”
dreamer has stripped 13 of its original emo-
tional overtones.

This argument illustrates the way in which
archetypes appear in practical experience :
They are, at the same time, both images and

emotions. One can speak of an archetype only
when these two aspects are simultaneous. When
there is merely the image, then there is simply
a word-picture of little consequence. But by
being charged with emotion, the image gains
numinosity (or psychic energy) ; it becomes
dynamic, and consequences of some kind must
flow from it.

I am aware that it is difficult to grasp this
concept, because I am trying to use words to
describe something whose very nature makes it
incapable of precise definition. But since so
many people have chosen to treat archetypes
as if they were part of a mechanical system
that can be learned by rote, it is essential to
insist that they are not mere names, or even
philosophical concepts. They are pieces of life
itself— images that are integrally connected to
the living individual by the bridge of the
emotions. That is why it is impossible to give
an arbitrary (or universal) interpretation of any
archetype. It must be explained in the manner
indicated by the whole life-situation of the par-
ticular individual to whom it relates.

Thus, in the case of a devout Christian, the
symbol of the cross can be interpreted only in
its Christian context — unless the dream pro-
duces a very strong reason to look beyond it.
Even then, the specific Christian meaning
should be kept in mind. But one cannot say
that, at all times and in all circumstances, the
symbol of the cross has the same meaning. If
that were so, it would be stripped of its numin-
osity, lose its vitality, and become a mere word.

Those who do not realize the special feeling
tone of the archetype end with nothing more
than a jumble of mythological concepts, which
can be strung together to show that everything
means anything — or nothing at all. All the
corpses in the world are chemically identical,
but living individuals are not. Archetypes come
to life only when one patiently tries to discover
why and in what fashion they are meaningful
to a living individual.

The mere use of words is futile when you do
not know what they stand for. This is particu-
larly true in psychology, where we speak ofarche-
types such as the anima and animus, the wise

96

The ancient Chinese connected the
moon with the goddess K wan -Yin
(pictured above). Other societies
have personified the moon as a
divinity And though modern space
flight has proved that the moon is
only a cratered ball of dirt (left),
we have retained something of the
archetypal attitude in our familiar
association of the moon with love
and romance.

97

In a child's unconscious we can see
the power (and universality) of
archetypal symbols. A seven-year-
old's painting (left) —a huge sun
driving away black birds, demons
of the night — has the flavor of a
true myth Children at play (right)
spontaneously dance in as natural
a form of self-expression as the
ceremonial dances of primitives.
Ancient folklore still exists in
children's "ritual'' beliefs: For
instance, children all over Britain
(and elsewhere) believe it is lucky
to see a white horse — which is a
well-known symbol of life A Celtic
goddess of creativity, Epona, shown
(far right) riding a horse, was often
personified as a white mare.

man, the Great Mother, and so on. You can
know all about the saints, sages, prophets, and
other godly men, and all the great mothers of
the world. But if they are mere images whose
numinosity you have never experienced, it will
be as if you were talking in a dream, for you
will not know what you are talking about. The
mere words you use will be empty and valueless.
They gain life and meaning only when you
try to take into account their numinosity — i.e.
their relationship to the living individual. Only
then do you begin to understand that their
names mean very little, whereas the way they
are related to you is all-important.

The symbol-producing function of our
dreams is thus an attempt to bring the original
mind of man into “advanced" or differentiated
consciousness, where it has never been before
and where, therefore, it has never been sub-
jected to critical self-reflection. For, in ages long
past, that original mind w as the whole of man’s
personality. As he developed consciousness, so
his conscious mind lost contact with some of
that primitive psychic energy. And the consci-
ous mind has never known that original mind;
for it w as discarded in the process of evolving
the very differentiated consciousness that alone
could be aware of it.

Yet it seems that what we call the uncon-
scious has preserved primitive characteristics
that formed part of the original mind. It is to

9 «

these characteristics that the symbols of dreams
constantly refer, as if the unconscious sought to
bring back all the old things from which the
mind freed itself as it evoked illusions, fanta-
sies, archaic thought forms, fundamental in-
stincts, and so on.

This is what explains the resistance, even
fear, that people often experience in approach-
ing unconscious matters. These relict contents
are not merely neutral or indifferent. On the
contrary, they are so highly charged that they
art' often more than merely uncomfortable.
They can cause real fear. The more they are
repressed, the more they spread through the
w hole personality in the form of a neurosis.

It is this psychic energy that gives them such
vital importance. It is just as if a man who has
lived through a period of unconsciousness
should suddenly realize that there is a gap in
his memory — that important events seem to
have taken place that he cannot remember. In
so far as he assumes that the psyche is an ex-
clusively personal affair (and this is the usual
assumption), he will try to retrieve the appar-
ently lost infantile memories. But the gaps in
his childhood memory are merely the symp-
toms of a much greater loss the loss of the
primitive psyche.

As the evolution of the embryonic body re-
peats its prehistory, so the mind also develops
through a series of prehistoric stages. The main

task of dreams is to bring back a sort of '“recol-
lection" of the prehistoric, as well as the infan-
tile world, right down to the level of' the most
primitive instincts. Such recollections can have
a remarkably healing e fleet in certain cases, as
Freud saw long ago. This observation confirms
the view that an infantile memory gap la so-
called amnesia) represents a positive loss and
its recovery can bring a positiv e increase in life
and well-being.

Because a child is physically small and its
conscious thoughts are scarce and simple, we
do not realize the far-reaching complications of
the infantile mind that are based on its original
identity with the prehistoric psyche. That
“original mind" is just as much present and
still functioning in the child as the evolutionary
stages of mankind are in its embryonic body.
If' the reader remembers what I said earlier
about the remarkable dreams of the child who
made a present of her dreams to her father, he
will get a good idea of what I mean.

In infantile amnesia, one finds strange mytho-
logical fragments that also often appear in later
psychoses. Images of this kind are highly numi-
nous and therefore very important. If such re-
collections reappear in adult life, they may in
some cases cause profound psychological dis-
turbance, while in other people they can pro-
duce miracles of healing or religious conver-
sions. Often they bring back a piece of life.

missing for a long time, that gives purpose to
and thus enriches human life.

The recollection of infantile memories and
the reproduction of archetypal ways of psychic
behavior can create a wider horizon and a
greater extension of consciousness on condi-
tion that one succeeds in assimilating and inte-
grating in the conscious mind the lost and
regained contents. Since they are not neutral,
their assimilation will modify the personality,
just as they themselves will have to undergo
certain alterations. In this part of what is called
"the individuation process" (which Dr. M.-L.
von Franz describes in a later section of this
book), the interpretation of symbols plays an
important practical role. For the symbols are
natural attempts to reconcile and unite oppo-
sites within the psyche.

Naturally, just seeingand then brushing aside
the symbols would have no such effect and
would merely re-establish the old neurotic con-
dition and destroy the attempt at a synthesis.
But, unfortunately, those rare people who do
not deny the v ery existence of the archetypes
almost invariably treat them as mere words and
forget their living reality. When their numino-
sity has thus (illegitimately ) been banished, the
process of limitless substitution begins in other
words, one glides easily from archetype to
archetype, with everything meaning every-
thing. It is true enough that the forms of arche-
type's are to a considerable extent exchangeable.
But their numinosity is and remains a fact, and
represents the value of an archetypal event.

This emotional value must be kept in mind
and allowed for throughout the whole intel-
lectual process of dream interpretation. It is
only too easy to lose' this value, because think-
ing and feeling are so diametrically opposed
that thinking almost automatically throws out
feeling value's and vice versa. Psychology is the
only science that has to take the factor of value
fi.e. feeling i into ac count, because it is the' link
between physical events and life'. Psvchologv
is often accused of not being scientific on this
account; but its critics fail to understand the
scientific and practical necessity of giv ing due
consideration to feeling.

IOO

Healing the split

Our intellect has created a new world that
dominates nature, and has populated it with
monstrous machines. The latter are so indu-
bitably useful that we cannot see even a possi-
bility of getting rid of them or our subservience
to them. Man is bound to follow the adventur-
ous promptings of his scientific and inventive
mind and to admire himself for his splendid
achievements. At the same time, his genius
shows the uncanny tendency to invent things
that become more and more dangerous, be-
cause they represent better and better means
for wholesale suicide.

In view of the rapidly increasing avalanche
of world population, man has already begun to
seek ways and means of keeping the rising flood
at bay. But nature may anticipate all our
attempts by turning against man his own cre-
ative mind. The H-bomb, for instance, would
put an effective stop to overpopulation. In spite
of our proud domination of nature, we are still
her victims, for we have not even learned to
control our own nature. Slowly but, it appears,
inevitably, we are courting disaster.

There are no longer any gods whom we can
invoke to help us. The great religions of the
world suffer from increasing anemia, because
the helpful numina have fled from the woods,
rivers, and mountains, and from animals, and
the god-men have disappeared underground
into the unconscious. There we fool ourselves

Above left, the 20th century's
greatest city — New York. Below,
the end of another city — Hiroshima,

1 945. Though man may seem to have
gained ascendance over nature,

Jung always pointed out that man
has not yet gained control over
his own nature.

that they lead an ignominious existence among
the relics of* our past. Our present lives are
dominated by the goddess Reason, who is our
greatest and most tragic illusion. By the aid of
reason, so we assure ourselves, we have “con-
quered nature.”

But this is a mere slogan, for the so-called
conquest of nature overwhelms us with the
natural fact of overpopulation and adds to our
troubles by our psychological incapacity to
make the necessary political arrangements. It
remains quite natural for men to cjuarrel and
to struggle for superiority over one another.
How then have we “conquered nature”?

As any change must begin somewhere, it is
the single individual who will experience it and
carry it through. The change must indeed be-
gin with an individual; it might be any one of
us. Nobody can afford to look around and to
wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to
do himself. But since nobody seems to know
what to do, it might be worth while for each of
us to ask himself whether by any chance his or
her unconscious may know something that will
help us. Certainly the conscious mind seems
unable to do anything useful in this respect.
Man today is painfully aware of the fact that
neither his great religions nor his various philo-
sophies seem to provide him with those power-
ful animating ideas that would give him the
security he needs in face of the present condi-
tion of the world.

I know what the Buddhists would say:
Things would go right if people would only
follow the “noble eightfold path” of the
Dharma (doctrine, law) and had true insight
into the Self. The Christian tells us that if only
people had faith in God, we should have a
better world. The rationalist insists that if
people were intelligent and reasonable, all our
problems would be manageable. The trouble
is that none of them manages to solve these
problems himself.

IOI

Christians often ask why God does not speak
to them, as he is believed to have done in for-
mer days. When I hear such questions, it always
makes me think of the rabbi who was asked
how it could be that God often showed himself
to people in the olden days whereas nowadays
nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied:

4 4 Nowadays there is no longer anybody who
can bow low enough.”

This answer hits the nail on the head. We
are so captivated by and entangled in our sub-
jective consciousness that we have forgotten the
age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through
dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the
world of unconscious fantasies as useless illu-
sions; the Christian puts his Church and his
Bible between himself and his unconscious;
and the rational intellectual does not yet know
that his consciousness is not his total psyche.
This ignorance persists today in spite of the
fact that for more than 70 years the uncon-
scious has been a basic scientific concept that
is indispensable to any serious psychological
investigation.

We can no longer afford to be so God-
Almighty-like as to set ourselves up as judges
of the merits or demerits of natural phenomena.
We do not base our botany upon the old-
fashioned division into useful and useless plants,
or our zoology upon the naive distinction be-
tween harmless and dangerous animals. But we
still complacently assume that consciousness is
sense and the unconscious is nonsense. I n science
such an assumption would be laughed out of
court. Do microbes, for instance, make sense
or nonsense?

Whatever the unconscious may be, it is a
natural phenomenon producing symbols that
prove to be meaningful. We cannot expect
someone who has never looked through a micro-
scope to be an authority on microbes; in the
same way, no one who has not made a serious
study of natural symbols can be considered a
competent judge in this matter. But the general
undervaluation of' the human soul is so great
that neither the great religions nor the philoso-
phies nor scientific rationalism have been will-
ing to look at it twice.

In spite of the fact that the Catholic Church
admits the occurrence of somnia a Deo rrussa
(dreams sent by God), most of its thinkers
make no serious attempt to understand dreams.
I doubt whether there is a Protestant treatise or
doctrine that would stoop so low as to admit
the possibility that the vox Dei might be per-
ceived in a dream. But if a theologian really
believes in God, by what authority does he
suggest that God is unable to speak through
dreams ?

1 have spent more than half a century in
investigating natural symbols, and I have come
to the conclusion that dreams and their symbols
are not stupid and meaningless. On the con-
trary, dreams provide the most interesting in-
formation for those who take the trouble to
understand their symbols. The results, it is true,
have little to do with such worldly concerns
as buying and selling. But the meaning of life
is not exhaustively explained by one’s business
life, nor is the deep desire of the human heart
answered by a bank account.

In a period of human history when all avail-
able energy is spent in the investigation of
nature, very little attention is paid to the essence
of man, which is his psyche, although many
researches are made into its conscious functions.
But the really complex and unfamiliar part of
the mind, from which symbols are produced,
is still virtually unexplored. It seems almost in-
credible that though we receive signals from it
every night, deciphering these communications
seems too tedious for any but a very few people
to be bothered with it. Man's greatest instru-
ment, his psyche, is little thought of, and it is
often directly mistrusted and despised. 44 It’s
only psychological'’ too often means: It is
nothing.

Where, exactly, does this immense prejudice
come from? We have obviously been so busy
with the question of what we think that we
entirely forget to ask what the unconscious
psyche thinks about us. The ideas of Sigmund
Freud confirmed for most people the existing
contempt for the psyche. Before him it had been
merely overlooked and neglected; it has now
become a dump for moral refuse.

i m

This modern standpoint is surely one-sided
and unjust. It does not even accord with the
known facts. Our actual knowledge of the un-
conscious shows that it is a natural phenomenon
and that, like Nature herself, it is at least
neutral. It contains all aspects of human nature
— light and dark, beautiful and ugly, good and
evil, profound and silly. The study of individual,
as well as of collective, symbolism is an enor-
mous task, and one that has not yet been mast-
ered. But a beginning has been made at last.
The early results are encouraging, and they
seem to indicate an answer to many so far un-
answered questions of present-day mankind.

Above, Rembrandt's Philosopher
with an Open Book (1633). The
inward-looking old man provides an
image of Jung s belief that each of us
must explore his own unconscious
The unconscious must not be ignored;
it is as natural, as limitless, and
as powerful as the stars.

io 3

2 Ancient myths and modern man

Joseph L. Henderson

A ceremonial mask from the island of New Ireland (New Guinea

Ancient myths and modern man

The eternal symbols

The ancient history of man is being meaning-
fully rediscovered today in the symbolic images
and myths that have survived ancient man. As
archaeologists dig deep into the past, it is less
the events of historical time that we learn to
treasure than the statues, designs, temples, and
languages that tell of old beliefs. Other symbols
are revealed to us by the philologists and reli-
gious historians, who can translate these beliefs
into intelligible modern concepts. These in turn
are brought to life by the cultural anthropolo-
gists. They can show that the same symbolic
patterns can be found in the rituals or myths of
small tribal societies still existing, unchanged
for centuries, on the outskirts of civilization.

All such researches have done much to cor-
rect the one-sided attitude of those modern men
who maintain that such symbols belong to the
peoples of antiquity or to "backward" modern
tribes and are therefore irrelevant to the com-
plexities of modern life. In London or New
York we may dismiss the fertility rites of neo-
lithic man as archaic superstition. If anyone
claims to have seen a vision or heard voices, he

is not treated as a saint or as an oracle. It is
said he is mentally disturbed. We read the
myths of the ancient Greeks or the folk stories
of American Indians, but we fail to see any
connection between them and our attitudes to
the ‘"heroes” or dramatic events of today.

Yet the connections are there. And the sym-
bols that represent them have not lost their re-
levance for mankind.

One of the main contributions of our time
to the understanding and revaluing of such
eternal symbols has been made by Dr. Jung’s
School of Analytical Psychology. It has helped
to break down the arbitrary distinction between
primitive man, to whom symbols seem a natural
part of everyday life, and modern man, for
whom symbols are apparently meaningless and
irrelevant.

As Dr. Jung has pointed out earlier in this
book, the human mind has its own history and
the psyche retains traces left from previ-
ous stages of its development. More than this,
the contents of' the unconscious exert a forma-
tive influence on the psyche. Consciously we

may ignore them, hut unconsciously we respond
to them, and to the symbolic forms including
dreams in which they express themselves.

The individual may feel that his dreams are
spontaneous and disconnected. But over a long
period of time the analyst can observe a series
of dream images and note that they have a
meaningful pattern; and by understanding this
his patient may eventually acquire a new atti-
tude to life. Some of the symbols in such
dreams derive from what l)r. Jung has called
"the collective unconscious" that is, the part
of the psyche that retains and transmits the
common psychological inheritance of mankind.
These symbols are so ancient and unfamiliar
to modern man that he cannot directly under-
stand or assimilate them.

It is here that the analyst can help. Possibly
the patient must be freed from the encumbrance
of symbols that have grown stale and inappro-
priate. Or possibly he must be assisted to dis-
cover the abiding value of an old symbol that,
far from being dead, is seeking to be reborn in
modern form.

Before the analyst can effectively explore the
meaning of symbols with a patient, he must
himself acquire a wider knowledge of their
origins and significance. For the analogies be-
tween ancient myths and the stories that appear

in the dreams of modern patients are neither
trivial nor accidental. They exist because the
unconscious mind of modern man preserves the
symbol-making capacity that once found ex-
pression in the beliefs and rituals of the primi-
tive. And that capacity still plays a role of vital
psychic importance. In more ways than we re-
alize, we are dependent on the messages that
are carried by such symbols, and both our atti-
tudes and our behavior are profoundly in-
fluenced by them.

In wartime, for instance, one finds increased
interest in the works of Homer, Shakespeare, and
Tolstoi, and we read with a new understanding
those passages that give war its enduring (or
“archetypal”) meaning. They evoke a response
from us that is much more profound than it
could be from someone who has never known
the intense emotional experience of war. The
battles on the plains of Troy were utterly un-
like the fighting at Agincourt or Borodino, yet
tin* great writers are able to transcend the
differences of time and place and to express
themes that are universal. We respond because
these themes are fundamentally symbolic.

A more striking example should be familiar
to anyone who has grown up in a Christian
society. At Christmas we may express our inner
feeling for the mythological birth of a semi-

\

Far left, a symbolic ceremony of
antiquity in 20th-century form The
American astronaut John Glenn in
a Washington parade after his orbit
of the earth in 1 962 like a hero
of old, after a victory, returning
home in a triumphal procession

Center left, a cross- like sculpture
of a Greek fertility goddess (c. 2500
B.C.). Left, two views of b 1 2th
century Scots stone cross that
retains some pagan femaleness:
the 'breasts ' at the crossbar
Right, another age-old archetype
reborn in a new guise: a Russian
poster for an "atheistic" festival
at Easter, to replace the Christian
festival just as the Christian
Easter was superimposed on earlier
pagan solstice rites.

IO?

divine child, even though we may not believe
in the doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ or
have any kind of conscious religious faith. Un-
knowingly, we have fallen in with the symbol-
ism of rebirth. This is a relic of an immensely
older solstice festival, which carries the hope
that the fading winter landscape of the northern
hemisphere will be renewed. For all our sophis-
tication we find satisfaction in this symbolic
festival, just as we join with our children at
Easter in the pleasant ritual of Easter eggs and
Easter rabbits.

But do we understand what we do, or see
the connection between the story of Christ’s
birth, death, and resurrection and the folk
symbolism of Easter? Usually we do not even
care to consider such things intellectually.

Yet they complement each other. Christ’s
crucifixion on Good Friday seems at first sight
to belong to the same pattern of fertility sym-
bolism that one finds in the rituals of such other
“saviors” as Osiris, Tammuz, and Orpheus.
They, too, were of divine or semi-divine
birth, they flourished, were killed, and were
reborn. They belonged, in fact, to cyclic reli-
gions in which the death and rebirth of the
god-king was an eternally recurring myth.

But the resurrection of Christ on Easter Sun-
day is much less satisfying from a ritual point
of view than is the symbolism of the cyclic re-
ligions. For Christ ascends to sit at the right
hand of God the Father: His resurrection
occurs once and for all.

It is this finality of the Christian concept of
the resurrection (the Christian idea of the Last
Judgment has a similar “closed” theme) that
distinguishes Christianity from other god-king
myths. It happened once, and the ritual merely
commemorates it. But this sense of finality is
probably one reason why early Christians, still
influenced by pre-Christian traditions, felt that
Christianity needed to be supplemented by
some elements of an older fertility ritual. They
needed the recurring promise of rebirth; and
that is what is symbolized by the egg and the
rabbit of Easter.

I have taken two quite different examples to
show how modern man continues to respond to
profound psychic influences of a kind that, con-
sciously, he dismisses as little more than the
folk tales of superstitious and uneducated
peoples. But it is necessary to go much further
than this. The more closely one looks at the
history of symbolism, and at the role that sym-

r / i

wk

Left, a 1 3th-century Japanese scroll
painting of the destruction of a
city; below, similarly dominated
by flame and smoke, St. Paul's
Cathedral, London, during an air
raid in World War II. Methods of
warfare have changed over the
ages, but the emotional impact of
war is timeless and archetypal.

bols have played in the life of many different
cultures, the more one understands that there
is also a re-creative meaning in these symbols.

Some symbols relate to childhood and the
transition to adolescence, others to maturity,
and others again to the experience of old age,
when man is preparing for his inevitable death.
Dr. Jung has described how the dreams of a girl
of eight contained the symbols one normally
associates with old age. Her dreams presented
aspects of initiation into life as belonging to the
same archetypal pattern as initiation into death.
This progression of symbolic ideas may take
place, therefore, within the unconscious mind
of modern man just as it took place in the
rituals of ancient societies.

Thiscrucial link between archaic or primitive
myths and the symbols produced by the un-
conscious is of immense practical importance to
the analyst. It enables him to identify and to
interpret these symbols in a context that gives
them historical perspective as well as psycholo-
gical meaning. I shall now take some of the
more important myths of antiquity and show
how — and to what purpose — they are analo-
gous to the symbolic material that we encoun-
ter in our dreams.

Top left, Christ’s nativity; center,
his crucifixion; bottom, his ascension.
His birth, death, and rebirth follows
the pattern of many ancient hero
myths — a pattern originally based on
seasonal fertility rites like those
probably held 3000 years ago at
England's Stonehenge (seen below
at dawn at the summer solstice).

Heroes and hero makers

The myth of the hero is the most common and
the best-known myth in the world. We find it
in the classical mythology of Greece and Rome,
in the Middle Ages, in the Far East, and among
contemporary primitive tribes. It also appears
in our dreams. It has an obvious dramatic
appeal, and a less obvious, but nonetheless pro-
found, psychological importance.

These hero myths vary enormously in detail,
but the more closely one examines them the
more one sees that structurally they are very
similar. They have, that is to say, a universal
pattern, even though they were developed by
groups or individuals without any direct cul-
tural contact with each other— by, for instance,
tribes of Africans or North American Indians,
or the Greeks, or the Incas of Peru. Over and
over again one hears a tale describing a hero's
miraculous but humble birth, his early proof of
superhuman strength, his rapid rise to promi-
nence or power, his triumphant struggle with

the forces of evil, his fallibility to the sin of
pride (hybris), and his fall through betrayal or
a “heroic" sacrifice that ends in his death.

I shall later explain in more detail why I be-
lieve that this pattern has psychological mean-
ing both for the individual, who is endeavoring
to discover and assert his personality, and for a
whole society, which has an equal need to
establish its collective identity. But another im-
portant characteristic of the hero myth provides
a clue. In many of these stories the early weak-
ness of the hero is balanced by the appearance
of strong “tutelary" figures - or guardians-
who enable him to perform the superhuman
tasks that he cannot accomplish unaided.
Among the Greek heroes, Theseus had Posei-
don, god of the sea, as his deity; Perseus had
Athena; Achilles had Gheiron, the wise cen-
taur, as his tutor.

These godlike figures are in 1'act symbolic re-
presentatives of the whole psyche, the larger

The hero's early proof of strength
occurs in most hero myths. Below,
the infant Hercules killing two
serpents Top right, the young
King Arthur, alone able to draw a
magic sword from a stone. Bottom
right, America's Davy Crockett, who
killed a bear when he was three.

I IO

Above, two examples of the hero’s
betrayal : the biblical hero Samson
(top), betrayed by Delilah; and the
Persian hero Rustam, led into a
trap by a man he trusted. Below,
a modern result of hybns (over-
confidence) : German prisoners in
Stalingrad, 1 941 , after Hitler
invaded Russia in winter.

Above, three examples of the tutelary
or guardian figure that accompanies
the archetypal hero. Top, from Greek
myth, the centaur Cheiron giving
instruction to the youthful Achilles
Center, King Arthur's guardian, the
magician Merlin (holding a scroll).
Bottom, an instance from modern life:
the trainer on whose knowledge and
experience a professional boxer
often depends.

Most heroes must face and overcome
various monsters and forces of evil.
Top, the Scandinavian hero Sigurd
(lower right of picture) slays the
serpent Fafnir. Center, the ancient
Babylonian epic hero Gilgamesh
battling with a lion Bottom, the
modern American comic strip hero
Superman, whose one-man war
against crime often requires him to
rescue pretty girls

I I I

and more comprehensive identity that supplies
the strength that the personal ego lacks. Their
special role suggests that the essential function
of the heroic myth is the development of the
individual’s ego-consciousness — his awareness
of his own strengths and weaknesses- in a man-
ner that will equip him for the arduous tasks
with which life confronts him. Once the indi-
vidual has passed his initial test and can enter
the mature phase of life, the hero myth loses its
relevance. The hero’s symbolic death becomes,
as it were, the achievement of that maturity.

I have so far been referring to the complete
hero myth, in which the whole cycle from birth
to death is elaborately described. But it is essen-
tial to recognize that at each of the stages in
this cycle there are special forms of the hero
story that apply to the particular point reached
by the individual in the development of his ego-
consciousness, and to the specific problem con-
fronting him at a given moment. That is to
say, the image of the hero evolves in a manner
that reflects each stage of the evolution of the
human personality.

This concept can be more easily understood
if I present it in wfr^t amounts to a diagram.
1 take this example from the obscure North
American tribe of Winnebago Indians, because
it sets out quite clearly four distinct stages in
the evolution of the hero. In these stories (which
Dr. Paul Radin published in 1948 under the

title Hero Cycles of the Winnebago ) we can see
the definite progression from the most primitive
to the most sophisticated concept of the hero.
This progression is characteristic of other hero
cycles. Though the symbolic figures in them
naturally have different names, their roles are
similar, and we shall understand them better
once we have grasped the point made by this
example.

Dr. Radin noted lour distinct cycles in the
evolution of the hero myth. He named them the
Trickster cycle, the Hare cycle, the Red Horn
cycle, and the Twin cycle. He correctly per-
ceived the psychology of this evolution when he
said: "It represents our efforts to deal with the
problem of growing up, aided by the illusion of
an eternal fiction."

The Trickster cycle corresponds to the earliest
and least developed period of life. Trickster is
a figure whose physical appetites dominate his
behavior; he has the mentality of an infant.
Lacking any purpose beyond the gratification
of his primary needs, he is cruel, cynical, and
unfeeling. (Our stories of Brer Rabbit or Rey-
nard the Fox preserve the essentials of the
Trickster myth.) This figure, which at the out-
set assumes the form of an animal, passes from
one mischievous exploit to another. But, as he
does so, a change comes over him. At the end
of his rogue’s progress he is beginning to take
on the physical likeness of a grown man.

1 12

The next figure is Hare. He also, like
Trickster (whose animal traits are represented
among some American Indians by a coyote),
first appears in animal form. He has not yet
attained mature human stature, but all the
same he appears as the founder of human
culture the Transformer. The Winnebago be-
lieve that, in giving them their famous Medicine
Rite, he became their savior as well as their
culture-hero. This myth was so powerful, Dr.
Radin tells us, that the members of the Peyote
Rite were reluctant to give up Hare when
Christianity began to penetrate the tribe. He
became merged with the figure of Christ, and
some of them argued that they had no need of
Christ since they already had Hare. This arche-
typal figure represents a distinct advance on
Trickster: One can see that he is becoming a
socialized being, correcting the instinctual and
infantile urges found in the Trickster cycle.

Red Horn, the third of this series of hero
figures, is an ambiguous person, said to be the
youngest of 10 brothers. He meets the require-
ments of an archetypal hero by passing such
tests as winning a race and by proving himself
in battle. His superhuman power is shown by
his ability to defeat giants by guile (in a game
of dice) or by strength (in a wrestling match).
He has a powerful companion in the form of a
thunderbird called “Storms-as-he-walks,” whose
strength compensates for whatever weakness

Red Horn may display. With Red Horn we
have reached the world of man, though an
archaic world, in which the aid of superhuman
powers or tutelary gods is needed to ensure
man's victory over the evil forces that beset him.
Toward the end of the story the hero-god de-
parts, leaving Red Horn and his sons on earth.
The danger to man's happiness and security
now comes from man himself.

This basic theme (which is repeated in the
last cycle, that of the Twins) raises, in effect,
the vital question: How long can human be-
ings. be successful without falling victims to
their own pride or, in mythological terms, to
the jealousy of the gods?

Though the Twins are said to be the sons of
the Sun, they are essentially human and to-
gether constitute a single person. Originally
united in the mother's womb, they were forced
apart at birth. Yet they belong together, and
it is necessary — though exceedingly difficult —
to reunite them. In these two children we see
the two sides of man's nature. One of them.
Flesh, is acquiescent, mild, and without initia-
tive; the other, Stump, is dynamic and rebel-
lious. In some of the stories of the Twin Heroes
these attitudes are refined to the point where
one figure represents the introvert, whose main
strength lies in his powers of reflection, and the
other is an extravert, a man of action who can
accomplish great deeds.

"Trickster": the first, rudimentary
stage in the development of the
hero myth, in which the hero is
instinctual, uninhibited, and often
childish. Far left, the 1 6th-century
Chinese epic hero Monkey, shown
(in a modern Peking opera) tricking
a river king into giving up a magic
staff. Left, on a sixth -century
B.c. jar, the infant Hermes in his
cradle after having stolen Apollo's
cattle Right, the trouble-making
Norse god Loki (a 19th-century
sculpture). Far right, Charlie
Chaplin creating a disturbance in
the 1 936 film Modern Times — a
20th-century trickster.

1 >3

For a long time these two heroes are invin-
cible: Whether they are presented as two sep-
arate figures or as two-in-one, they carry all
before them. Yet, like the warrior gods of
Navaho Indian mythology, they eventually
sicken from the abuse of their own power. There
are no monsters left in heaven or on earth for
them to overcome, and their consequent wild
behavior brings retribution in its train. The
Winnebago say that nothing, in the end, was
safe from them — not even the supports on which
the world rests. When the Twins killed one of
the four animals that upheld the earth, they
had overstepped all limits, and the time had
come to put a stop to their career. The punish-
ment they deserved was death.

Thus, in both the Red Horn cycle and that of
the Twins, we see the theme of sacrifice or
death of the hero as a necessary cure for hybris ,
the pride that has over-reached itself. In the
primitive societies whose levels of culture cor-
respond to the Red Horn cycle, it appears that
this danger may have been forestalled by the
institution of propitiatory human sacrifice- a
theme that has immense symbolic importance
and recurs continually in human history. The
Winnebago, like the Iroquois and a few Algon-
quin tribes, probably ate human flesh as a tote-
mic ritual that could tame their individualistic
and destructive impulses.

In the examples of the hero’s betrayal or de-
feat that occur in European mythology, the
theme of ritual sacrifice is more specifically em-
ployed as a punishment for hybris . But the
W innebago, like the Navaho, do not go so far.
Though the Twins erred, and though the
punishment should have been death, they
themselves became so frightened by their irre-
sponsible power that they consented to live in a
state of permanent rest: The conflicting sides
of human nature were again in equilibrium.

I have given this description of the four types
of hero at some, length because it provides a
clear demonstration of the pattern that occurs
both in the historic myths and in the hero
dreams ol contemporary man. With this in mind
we can examine the following dream of a
middle-aged patient. The interpretation of this
dream shows how the analytical psychologist
can, from his knowledge* of mythology, help his
patient find an answer to what might otherwise
seem an insoluble riddle. This man dreamed he
was at a theatre, in the role of “an important
spectator whose opinion is respected.” There
was an act in which a white monkey was stand-
ing on a pedestal with men around him. In
recounting his dream the man said:

My guide explains the theme to me.' It is the
ordeal of a young sailor who is exposed both to

The second stage in the evolution
of the hero is the founder of human
culture. Left, a Navaho sand painting
of the myth of Coyote, who stole
fire from the gods and gave it to
man. In Greek myth Prometheus also
stole fire from the gods for man —
for which he was chained to a rock
and tortured by an eagle (below,
on a sixth-century b.c. cup).

The hero in the third stage is a
powerful man-god — like Buddha. In
the first-century sculpture above,
Siddhartha begins the journey on
which he will receive enlightenment
and become Buddha.

Below left, a medieval Italian
sculpture of Romulus and Remus,
the twins (raised by a wolf) who
founded Rome — and who are the
best-known instance of the fourth
stage of the hero myth

In the fourth stage, the Twins
often misuse their power — as did
the Roman heroes Castor and Pollux
when they abducted the daughters
of Leucippus (below, in a painting
by the Flemish artist Rubens).

Crt

the wind and to being beaten up. I begin to
object that this white monkey is not a sailor at
all; but just at that moment a young man in
black stands up and I think that he must be the
true hero. But another handsome young man
strides toward an altar and stretches himself out
on it. They are making marks on his bare chest
as a preparation to offering him as a human
sacrifice.

Then I find myself on a platform with several
other people. We could get down by a small
ladder, but I hesitate to do so because there are
two young toughs standing by and I think that
they will stop us. But when a woman in the group
uses the ladder unmolested, I see that it is safe
and all of us follow the woman down.

Now a dream of this kind cannot be quickly
or simply interpreted. We have to unravel it
carefully in order to show both its relation to
the dreamer’s own life and its wider symbolic
implications. The patient who produced it was
a man who had achieved maturity in a physical
sense. He was successful in his career, and he
had apparently done pretty well as a husband
and father. Yet psychologically he was still
immature, and had not completed his youthful
phaseofdevelopment. 1 1 was this psychic imma-
turity that expressed itselfin his dreams as differ-
ent aspects of the hero myth. These images still
exerted a strong attraction for his imagination
even though they had long since exhausted any

of their meaning in terms of the reality of his
everyday life.

Thus, in a dream, we see a series of figures
theatrically presented as various aspects of a
figure that the dreamer keeps expecting will
turn out to be the true hero. The first is a white
monkey, the second a sailor, the third a young
man in black, and the last a “handsome young
man/' In the early part of the performance,
which is supposed to represent the sailor’s
ordeal, the dreamer sees only the white mon-
key. The man in black suddenly appears and as
suddenly disappears; he is a new figure who
first contrasts with the white monkey and is then
for a moment confused with the hero proper.
(Such confusion in dreams is not unusual. The
dreamer is not usually presented with clear
images by the unconscious. He has to puzzle out
a meaning from a succession of contrasts and
paradoxes.)

Significantly, these figures appear in the
course of a theatrical performance, and this
context seems to be a direct reference by the
dreamer to his own treatment by analysis: The
“guide” he mentions is presumably his analyst.
Yet he does not sec himself as a patient who is
being treated by a doctor but as “an important
spectator whose opinion is respected.” This is
the vantage point from which he sees certain
figures whom he associates with the experience

An individual psyche develops (as
does the hero myth) from a primitive,
childish stage — and often images
of the early stages can appear in the
dreams of psychologically immature
adults. The first stage might be
represented by the carefree play
of children — like the pillow fight
(far left) from the 1 933 French film
Zero de Conduite. The second
stage might be the reckless thrill-
seeking of early adolescence: Right,
American youths test their nerves
in a speeding car. A later stage
can produce idealism, and self-
sacrifice in late adolescence,
exemplified in the picture (opposite,
far right) taken during the East Berlin
rising (June 1 953) when young men
fought Russian tanks with stones

1 16

I

of growing up. The white monkey, for instance,
reminds him of the playful and somewhat law-
less behavior of boys between the'ages of seven
and 12. The sailor suggests the adventurousness
of early adolescence, together with the conse-
quent punishment by “beating” for irrespon-
sible pranks. The dreamer could offer no asso-
ciation to the young man in black, but in the
handsome young man about to be sacrificed he
saw a reminder of the self-sacrificing idealism
of late adolescence.

At this stage it is possible to put together the
historical material (or archetypal hero images)
and the data from the dreamer’s personal ex-
perience in order to see how they corroborate,
contradict, or qualify each other.

The first conclusion is that the white monkey
seems to represent Trickster-- or at least those
traits of personality that the Winnebago attri-
bute to Trickster. But, to me, the monkey also
stands for something that the dreamer has not
personally and adequately experienced for him-
self — he in fact says that in the dream he was
a spectator. I found out that as a boy he had
been excessively attached to his parents, and
that he was naturally introspective. For these
reasons he had never fully developed the bois-
terous qualities natural to late childhood; nor
had he joined in the games of his schoolfellows.
He had not, as the saying goes, “got up to mon-

key tricks” or practiced “monkeyshines.” The
saying provides the clue here. The monkey in
the dream is in fact a symbolic form of the
Trickster figure.

But why should Trickster appear as a mon-
key? And why should it be white? As I have
already pointed out, the Winnebago myth tells
us that, toward the end of the cycle, Trickster
begins to emerge in the physical likeness of a
man. And here, in the dream, is a monkey —
so close to a human being that it is a laughable
and not too dangerous caricature of a man.
The dreamer himself could offer no personal
association that could explain why the monkey
was white. But from our knowledge of primi-
tive symbolism we can conjecture that white-
ness lends a special quality of “god-likeness” to
this otherwise banal figure. (The albino is re-
garded as sacred in many primitive communi-
ties.) This fits in quite well with Trickster’s
semi-divine or semi-magical powers.

Thus, it seems, the white monkey symbolizes
for the dreamer the positive quality of child-
hood playfulness, which he had insufficiently
accepted at the time, and which he now feels
called upon to exalt. As the dream tells us, he
places it “on a pedestal,” where it becomes
something more than a lost childhood experi-
ence. It is, for the adult man, a symbol of
creative experimentalism.

Next we come to the conclusion about the
monkey. Is it a monkey, or is it a sailor who
has to put up with beatings? The dreamer’s
own associations pointed to the meaning of this
transformation. But in any case the next stage
in human development is one in which the irre-
sponsibility of childhood gives way to a period
of socialization, and that involves submission to
painful discipline. One could say, therefore,
that the sailor is an advanced form ofTrickster,
who is being changed into a socially responsible
person by means of an initiation ordeal. Draw-
ing on the history of symbolism, we can assume
that the wind represents the natural elements
in this process, and the beatings are those that
are humanly induced.

At this point, then, we have a reference to
the process that the Winnebago describe in the
Hare cycle, where the culture-hero is a weak
yet struggling figure, ready to sacrifice childish-
ness for the sake of further development. Once
again, in this phase of the dream, the patient is
acknowledging his failure to experience to the
full an important aspect of childhood and early
adolescence. He missed out on the playfulness
of the child, and also on the rather more ad-

vanced pranks of the young teenager, and he
is seeking ways in which those lost experiences
and personal qualities can be rehabilitated.

Next comes a curious change in the dream.
The young man in black appears, and for a
moment the dreamer feels that this is the “true
hero. ?? That is all we are told about the man
in black; yet this fleeting glimpse introduces a
theme of profound importance— a theme that
occurs frequently in dreams.

This is the concept of the “shadow,” which
plays such a vital role in analytical psychology.
Dr. Jung has pointed out that the shadow cast
by the conscious mind of the individual con-
tains the hidden, repressed, and unfavorable (or
nefarious) aspects of the personality. But this
darkness is not just the simple converse of the
conscious ego. Just as the ego contains unfavor-
able and destructive attitudes, so the shadow
has good qualities - normal instincts and
creative impulses. Ego and shadow, indeed,
although separate, are inextricably linked to-
gether in much the same way that thought and
feeling are related to each other.

The ego, nevertheless, is in conflict with the
shadow, in what Dr. Jung once called “the
battle for deliverance.” In the struggle of
primitive man to achieve consciousness, this
conflict is expressed by the contest between the
archetypal hero and the cosmic powers of evil,
personified by dragons and other monsters. In
the developing consciousness of the individual
the hero figure is the symbolic means by which
the emerging ego overcomes the inertia of the
unconscious mind, and liberates the mature

The young, undifferentiated ego-
personality is protected by the
mother— a protection imaged by
the sheltering Madonna, left (in
a painting by the 1 5th-century
Italian artist Piero della Francesca),
or by the Egyptian sky goddess Nut,
right, bending over the earth (in a
fifth-century b c. relief). But the
ego must eventually free itself from
unconsciousness and immaturity;
and its “battle for deliverance" is
often symbolized by a hero's battle
with a monster — like the Japanese
god Susanoo's battle with a serpent,
top right (in a 19th-century print).
The hero doesn't always win at
once: For instance, Jonah was
swallowed by the whale (far right,
from a 14th-century manuscript).

man from a regressive longing to return to the
blissful state of infancy in a world dominated
by his mother.

Usually, in mythology, the hero wins his
battle against the monster. (I shall say more
about this in a moment.) But there are other
hero myths in which the hero gives in to the
monster. A familiar type is that of Jonah and
the whale, in which the hero is swallowed by a
sea monster that carries him on a night sea
journey from west to east, thus symbolizing the
supposed transit of the sun from sunset to
dawn. The hero goes into darkness, which
represents a kind of death. I have encountered
this theme in dreams presented in my own
clinical experience.

The battle between the hero and the dragon
is the more active form of this myth, and it
shows more clearly the archetypal theme of the
ego’s triumph over regressive trends. For most
people the dark or negative side of the person-
ality remains unconscious. The hero, on the
contrary, must realize that the shadow exists

The ego's emergence can be
symbolized not by a battle but by a
sacrifice: death leading to rebirth.
Revolution is sacrificial in this way:
Delacroix's painting (below), Greece
expiring on the Ruins of Misso/onghi,
personifies the country killed by civil
war to be liberated and reborn. As
individual sacrifices: the British poet
Byron (above) died in Greece during
the revolution (1 824). Below left, the
Christian martyr St. Lucia sacrificed
her eyes and her life for her religion.

and that lie ran draw strength from it. Hr must
come to terms with its destructive powers if he
is to become sufficiently terrible to overcome
the dragon i.e. before the ego can triumph, it
must master and assimilate the shadow.

One can see this theme, incidentally, in a
well-known literary hero figure Goethe's char-
acter of Faust. In accepting the wager of
Mephistopheles. Faust put himself in the power
ol a “shadow" figure that Goethe describes as
“part of that power which, willing evil, finds
the good." Like the man whose dream I have
been discussing, Faust had failed to live out to
the full an important part of his early life. He
was, accordingly, an unreal or incomplete per-
son who lost himself in a fruitless cpiest for
metaphysical goals that failed to materialize.
He was still unw illing to accept life's challenge
to live both the good and the bad.

It is to this aspect of the unconscious that the
young man in black in my patient's dream
seems to refer. Such a reminder of the shadow
side of his personality, of its powerful potential

and its role in preparing the hero for the strug-
gles of life, is an essential transition from the
earlier parts of the dream to the theme of the
sacrificial hero: the handsome young man who
places himself on an altar. This figure repre-
sents the form of heroism that is commonly
associated to the ego- building process of late
adolescence. A man expresses the ideal prin-
ciples of his life at this time, sensing their power
both to transform himself and to change his re-
lations with others. He is, so to speak, in the
bloom of youth, attractive, full of energy and
idealism. Why, then, does he willingly offer
himself as a human sacrifice?

The reason, presumably, is the same as that
which made the Twins of the Winnebago myth
give up their power on pain of destruction. The
idealism of youth, which drives one so hard, is
bound to lead to over-confidence: The human
ego can be exalted to experience godlike attri-
butes, but only at the cost of over-reaching itself
and falling to disaster. (This is the meaning of
the story of Icarus, the youth who is carried

Below, a montage of World War I :
a call-to arms poster, infantry, a
military cemetery. Memorials and
religious services for soldiers who
gave their lives for their country
often reflect the cyclic death and
rebirth" theme of the archetypal
heroic sacrifice An inscription
on one British memorial to the dead
of World War I reads: "At the going
down of the sun and in the morning
we will remember them."

In mythology, a hero's death is
often due to his own hybris. which
causes the gods to humble him. As
a modern example: In 1 91 2 the
ship Titanic struck an iceberg and
sank. (Right, a montage of scenes
of the sinking, from the 1 943 film
Titanic.) Vet the Titanic had been
called "unsmkable": according to
the American author Walter Lord,
one sailor was heard to say, "God
himself couldn't sink this ship !"

V

up to heaven on his fragile, humanly contrived
wings, but who flies too close to the sun and
plunges to his doom.) All the same, the youth-
ful ego must always run this risk, for if a young
man does not strive for a higher goal than he
can safely reach, he cannot surmount the ob-
stacles between adolescence and maturity.

So far, I have been talking about the con-
clusions that, at the level of his personal asso-
ciations, my patient could draw from his own
dream. Yet there is an archetypal level of the
dream — the mystery of the proffered human
sacrifice. It is precisely because it is a mystery
that it is expressed in a ritual act that, in its
symbolism, carries us a long way back into

man’s history. Here, as the man lies stretched
out on an altar, we see a reference to an act
even more primitive than those performed on
the altar stone in the temple at Stonehenge.
There, as on so many primitive altars, we can
imagine a yearly solstice rite combined with
the death and rebirth of a mythological hero.

The ritual has a sorrow about it that is also
a kind of joy, an inward acknowledgment that
death also leads to a new life. Whether it is
expressed in the prose epic of the Winnebago
Indians, in a lament for the death of Balder in
the Norse eddas, in Walt Whitman’s poems of
mourning for Abraham Lincoln, or in the
dream ritual whereby a man returns to his

Heroes often fight monsters to
rescue "damsels in distress'' (who
symbolize the anima) Left, St.
George slays a dragon to free a
maiden (in a 1 5th-century Italian
painting). Right, in the 1 91 6 film
The Great Secret, the dragon has
become a locomotive but the heroic
rescue remains the same.

youthful hopes and fears, it is the same theme
— the drama of new birth through death.

The end of the dream brings out a curious
epilogue in which the dreamer at last becomes
involved in the action of the dream. He and
others are on a platform from which they have
to descend. He does not trust the ladder because
of the possible interference of hoodlums, but
a woman encourages him to believe he can go
down safely and this is accomplished. Since I
found out from his associations that the whole
performance he witnessed was part of his
analysis— a process of inner change that he was
experiencing — he was presumably thinking of
the difficulty of getting back to everyday reality
again. His fear of the “toughs," as he calls
them, suggests his fear that the Trickster arche-
type may appear in a collective form.

The saving elements in the dream are the
man-made ladder, which here is probably a
symbol of the rational mind, and the presence
of the woman who encourages the dreamer to
use it. Her appearance in the final sequence of
the dream points to a psychic need to include
a feminine principle as a complement to all
this excessively masculine activity.

It should not be assumed from what I have
said, or from the fact that I have chosen to use
the Winnebago myth to illuminate this particu-
lar dream, that one must seek for complete and
wholly mechanical parallels between a dream
and the materials one can find in the history of
mythology. Each dream is individual to the
dreamer, and the precise form it takes is deter-
mined by his own situation. What I have
sought to show is the manner in which the un-
conscious draws on this archetypal material and
modifies its patterns to the dreamer's needs.
Thus, in this particular dream, one must not
look for a direct reference to what the Winne-
bago describe in the Red Horn or Twin cycles;
the reference is rather to the essence of those
two themes to the sacrificial element in them.

As a general rule it can be said that the need
for hero symbols arises when the ego needs
strengthening— when, that is to say, the con-
scious mind needs assistance in some task that
it cannot accomplish unaided or without draw-
ing on the sources of strength that lie in the un-
conscious mind. In the dream I have been dis-
cussing, for instance, there was no reference to
one of the more important aspects of the myth
of the typical hero — his capacity to save or
protect beautiful women from terrible danger.
(The damsel in distress was a favorite myth of
medieval Europe.) This is one way in which
myths or dreams refer to the “anima" — the
feminine element of the male psyche that
Goethe called “the Eternal Feminine."

The nature and function of this female ele-
ment will be discussed later in this book by Dr.
von Franz. But its relation to the hero figure
can be illustrated here by a dream produced
by another patient, also a man of mature years.
He began by saying:

“I had returned from a long hike through
India. A woman had equipped myself and a
friend for the journey, and on my return I
reproached her for failing to give us black rain-
hats, telling her that through this oversight we
had been soaked by the rain."

This introduction to the dream, it later
emerged, referred to a period in this man's
youth when he was given to taking “heroic"
walks through dangerous mountain country in
company with a college friend. (As he had

i 23

never been to India, and in view of his own
associations to this dream, I concluded that the
dream journey signified his exploration of a
new region — not, that is to say, a real place but
the realm of the unconscious.)

In his dream the patient seems to feel that
a woman — presumably a personification of his
anima — has failed to prepare him properly for
this expedition. The lack of a suitable rainhat
suggests that he feels in an unprotected state of
mind, in which he is uncomfortably affected by
exposure to new and not altogether pleasant
experiences. He believes that the woman should
have provided a rainhat for him, just as his
mother provided clothes for him to wear as a
boy. This episode is reminiscent of his early
picaresque wanderings, when he was sustained
by the assumption that his mother (the original
feminine image) would protect him against all
dangers. As he grew older, he saw that this was
a childish illusion, and he now blames his mis-
fortune on his own anima, not his mother.

In the next stage of the dream the patient
speaks of participating in a hike with a group of
people. He grows tired and returns to an out-
door restaurant where he finds his raincoat, to-
gether with the rainhat that he had missed
earlier. He sits down to rest ; and, as he does so,
he notices a poster stating that a local high-
school boy is taking the part of Perseus in a
play. Then the boy in question appears — who
turns out to be not a boy at all but a husky

young man. He is dressed in gray with a black
hat, and he sits down to talk with another
young man dressed in a black suit. Immediately
alter this scene the dreamer feels a new vigor,
and finds that he is capable of rejoining his
party. They all then climb over the next hill.
There, below them, he sees their destination ; it
is a lovely harbor town. He feels both heartened
and rejuvenated by the discovery.

Here, in contrast to the restless, uncomfort-
able, and lonely journey of' the first episode,
the dreamer is with a group. The contrast
marks a change from an earlier pattern of
isolation and youthful protest to the socializing
influence of a relation to others. Since this im-
plies a new capacity for relatedness, it suggests
that his anima must now' be functioning better
than it was before — symbolized by his discov-
ery of the missing hat that the anima figure had
previously failed to provide for him.

But the dreamer is tired, and the scene at
the restaurant reflects his need to look at his
earlier attitudes in a new light, with the hope
of renewing his strength by this regression. And
so it turns out. What he first sees is a poster
suggesting the enactment of a youthful hero
role — a high-school boy playing the part of
Perseus. Then he sees the boy, now’ a man, with
a friend who makes a sharp contrast to him.
The one dressed in light gray, the other in
black, can be recognized, from what I have
previously said, as a version of the Tw ins. They

are hero-figures expressing the opposites of ego
and alter-ego, which, however, appear here in
a harmonious and unified relation.

The patient's associations confirmed this and
emphasized that the figure in gray represents a
well-adapted, worldly attitude to life, whereas
the figure in black represents the spiritual life,
in the sense that a clergyman wears black. That
they wore hats (and he now had found his own )
points to their having achieved a relatively
mature identity of a kind that he had felt to be
severely lacking in his own earlier adolescent
years, when the quality of “Tricksterism'’ still
clung to him, in spite of his idealistic self-image
as a seeker of wisdom.

His association to the Greek hero Perseus
was a curious one, which proved especially sig-
nificant because it revealed a glaring inaccu-
racy. It turned out that he thought Perseus was
the hero who slew the Minotaur and rescued
Ariadne from the Cretan labyrinth. As he wrote
the name down for me, he discovered his mis-
take — that it was Theseus, not Perseus, who
slew tlie Minotaur — and this mistake became
suddenly meaningful, as such slips often do, by
making him notice what these two heroes had
in common. They both had to overcome their
fear of unconscious demonic maternal powers
and had to liberate from these powers a single
youthful feminine figure.

Perseus had to cut off the head of the gorgon
Medusa, whose horrifying visage and snaky

locks turned all who gazed upon them to stone.
He later had to overcome the dragon that
guarded Andromeda. Theseus represented the
young patriarchal spirit of Athens w ho had to
brave the terrors of the Cretan labyrinth with
its monstrous inmate, the Minotaur, which per-
haps symbolized the unhealthy decadence of
matriarchal Crete. (In all cultures, the laby-
rinth has the meaning of an entangling and
confusing representation of the world of matri-
archal consciousness; it can be traversed only
by those who are ready for a special initiation
into the mysterious world of the collective un-
conscious.) Having overcome this danger,
Theseus rescued Ariadne, a maiden in distress.

This rescue symbolizes the liberation of the
anima figure from the devouring aspect of the
mother image. Not until this is accomplished
can a man achieve his first true capacity for
relatedness to women. The fact that this man
had failed adequately to separate the anima
from the mother was emphasized in another
dream, in which he encountered a dragon -a
symbolic image for the “devouring" aspect of
his attachment to his mother. This dragon pur-
sued him, and because he had no weapon , he
began to get the worst of the struggle.

Significantly, however, his wife appeared in
the dream, and her appearance somehow made
the dragon smaller and less threatening. This
change in the dream showed that in his mar-
riage the dreamer was belatedly overcoming

Some heroic battles and rescues
from Greek myth: Far left, Perseus
slays Medusa (on a sixth-century
b.c. vase) ; left, Perseus with
Andromeda (from a first-century B.C.
mural) whom he saved from a monster.
Right, Theseus kills the Minotaur
(on a first-century b.c. jar) watched
by Ariadne; below, on a Cretan coin
(67 b c ), the Minotaur’s labyrinth.

the attachment to his mother. In other words,
he had to find a means of freeing the psychic
energy attached to the mother-son relationship,
in order to achieve a more adult relation to
women -and, indeed, to adult society as a
whole. The hero-dragon battle was the symbolic
expression of this process of ‘'growing up."

But the hero's task has an aim that goes
beyond biological and marital adjustment. It is
to liberate the anima as that inner component
of the psyche that is necessary for any true
creative achievement. In this man's case we
have to guess the probability of this outcome
because it is not directly stated in the dream of
the Indian journey. But I am sure he would
confirm my hypothesis that his journey over the
hill and the sight of his goal as a peaceful har-
bor town contained the rich promise that he
would discover his authentic anima function.
He would thus be cured of his early resentment
at not being given protection (the rainhat) by
the woman for his journey through India. (In
dreams, significantly placed tow ns can often be
anima symbols.)

The man had won this promise of security
for himself by his contact with the authentic
hero archetype, and had found a new co-opera-
tive and related attitude to the group. His sense
of rejuvenation naturally followed. He had
drawn on the inner source of strength that the

hero archetype represents; he had clarified and
developed that part of him which was symbol-
ized by the woman; and he had, by his ego’s
heroic act, liberated himself from his mother.

These and many other examples of the hero
myth in modern dreams show that the ego as
hero is always essentially a bearer of culture
rather than a purely egocentric exhibitionist.
Even Trickster, in his misguided or unpurposive
way, is a contributor to the cosmos as primitive
man sees it. In Navaho mythology, as Coyote,
he hurled the stars into the sky as an act of
creation, he invented the necessary contingency
of death, and in the myth of emergence he
helped lead the people through the hollow reed
whereby they escaped from one world to an-
other above it where they were safe from the
threat of flood.

We have here a reference to that form of
creative evolution which evidently begins on a
childlike, preconscious, or animal level of exist-
ence. The ego's rise to effective conscious action
becomes plain in the true culture-hero. In the
same fashion the childish or adolescent ego frees
itself from the oppression of parental expecta-
tions and becomes individual. As part of this
rise to consciousness the hero-dragon battle may
have to be fought and refought to liberate
energy for the multitude of human tasks that
can form a culture pattern out of chaos.

The hero's rescue of a maiden can
symbolize the freeing of the amma
from the "devouring” aspect of the
mother. This aspect is represented,
far left, by Balinese dancers wearing
the mask of Rangda (left), a malign
female spirit; or by the serpent that
swallowed and then regurgitated the
Greek hero Jason (above).

As in the dream discussed on p. 1 24,
a common anima symbol is a harbor
town Below, a poster by Marc Chagall
pei sonifies Nice as a mermaid.

When this is successful, we see the full hero
image emerging as a kind of ego strength for,
if we are speaking in collective terms, a tribal
identity) that has no further need to overcome
the monsters and the giants. It has reached the
point where these deep forces can be person-
alized. The “feminine element" no longer ap-
pears in dreams as a dragon, but as a woman;
similarly, the “shadow" side of the personality
takes on a less menacing form.

This important point is illustrated in the
dream of a man nearing 50. All his life he had
suffered from periodic attacks of anxiety asso-
ciated with fear of failure (originally engen-
dered by a doubting mother). Yet his actual
achievements, both in his profession and in his
personal relations, were well above average. In
his dream his nine-year-old son appeared as a
young man of about 18 or 19, dressed in the
shining armor of a medieval knight. The young
man is called upon to fight a host of men in
black, which he prepares at first to do. Then he
suddenly removes his helmet, and smiles at the
leader of the menacing host; it is clear that
they will not engage in the battle but will
become friends.

The son in the dream is the man's own
youthful ego, which had frequently felt threat-
ened by the shadow in the form of self-doubt.
He had, in a sense, waged a successful crusade
against this adversary all his mature life. Now,
partly through the actual encouragement of
seeing his son grow up without such doubts, but
mainly by forming a suitable image of the hero
in the form closest to his own environmental
pattern, he finds it no longer necessary to fight
the shadow; he can accept it. That is what is
symbolized in the act of friendship. He is no
longer driven to a competitive struggle for indi-
vidual supremacy, but is assimilated to the cul-
tural task of forming a democratic sort of com-
munity. Such a conclusion, reached in the full-
ness of life, goes beyond the heroic task and
leads one to a truly mature attitude.

This change, however, does not take place
automatically. It requires a period of transition,
which is expressed in the various forms of the
archetype of initiation.

The archetype of initiation

In a psychological sense the hero image is not
to be regarded as identical with the ego proper.
It is better described as the symbolic means by
which the ego separates itself from the arche-
types evoked by the parental images in early
childhood. l)r. Jung has suggested that each
human being has originally a feeling of whole-
ness, a powerful and complete sense of the Self.
And from the Self - the totality of the psyche —
the individualized ego-consciousness emerges
as the individual grows up.

Within the past few years, the works of
certain followers of Jung have begun to docu-
ment the series of events by which the indi-
vidual ego emerges during the transition from
infancy through childhood. This separation can
never become final without severe injury to the
original sense of wholeness. And the ego must
continually return to re-establish its relation to

i 28

the Self in order to maintain a condition of
psychic health.

It would appear from my studies that the
hero myth is the first stage in the differentia-
tion of the psyche. I have suggested that it
seems to go through a fourfold cycle by which
the ego seeks to achieve its relative autonomy
from the original condition of wholeness. Unless
some degree of autonomy is achieved, the indi-
vidual is unable to relate himself to his adult
environment. But the hero myth does not
ensure that this liberation will occur. It only
shows how it is possible for it to occur, so that
the ego may achieve consciousness. There re-
mains the problem of maintaining and develop-
ing that consciousness in a meaningful way, so
that the individual can live a useful life and
can achieve the necessary sense of self-distinc-
tion in society.

Ancient history and the rituals of contem-
porary primitive societies have provided us with
a wealth of material about myths and rites of
initiation, whereby young men and women are
weaned away from their parents and forcibly
made members of their clan or tribe. But in
making this break with the childhood world,
the original parent archetype will be injured,
and the damage must be made good by a heal-
ing process of assimilation into the life of' the
group. (The identity of the group and the indi-
vidual is often symbolized by a totem animal.)
Thus the group fulfills the claims of the injured
archetype and becomes a kind of second parent
to which the young are first symbolically sacri-
ficed, only to re-emerge into a new life.

In this “drastic ceremony, which looks very
like a sacrifice to the powers that might hold
the young man back," as Dr. Jung has put it,

A primitive tribe's totem (often an
animal) symbolizes each tribesman's
identity with the tribal unit. Left,
an Australian aborigine imitating
{in a ritual dance) his tribe's totem
—an emu. Many modern groups
use totem-like animals as emblems:
Below, a heraldic lion (from the
Belgian coat of arms) on a 1 7th-
century allegorical map of Belgium.
Right, the falcon is the mascot of
the American Air Force Academy's
football team. Far right, modern
totemistic emblems that aren't
animals: a shop window display
of ties, badges, etc. of British
schools and clubs.

!29

we sec how the power of the original archetype
can never he permanently overcome, in the
manner envisaged by the hero-dragon battle,
without a crippling sense of alienation from the
fruit fill powers of the unconscious. We saw in
the myth of the Twins how their hybris . ex-
pressing excessive ego-Self separation, was cor-
rected by their own fear of the consequences,
which forced them back into a harmonious ego-
Self relation.

In tribal societies it is the initiation rite that
most effectively solves this problem. The ritual
takes the novice back to the deepest level of
original mother-child identity or ego-Self iden-
tity, thus forcing him to experience a symbolic
death. In other words, his identity is tempo-
rarily dismembered or dissolved in the collective
unconscious. From this state' lie is then cere-
monially rescued by the rite of The new birth.
This is the first act of true' consolidation ol the
c'go with the larger group, expressed as totem,
clan, or tribe, or all three combined.

The ritual, whether it is found in tribal
groups or in more complex societies, invariably
insists upon this rite of death and rebirth, which
provides the novice with a “rite of passage”
from one stage of life to the next, whether it is
from early childhood to later childhood or from
early to late adolescence' and from then to
maturin'.

Initiatory events are not, of course, confined
to the psychology of youth. Every new phase of
development throughout an individual's life is
accompanied by a repetition of the original
conflict between the claims of the Self and the
claims of the ego. In fact, this conflict may be
expressed more powerfully at the period of'
transition from early maturity to middle age
(between 35 and 40 in our society i than at any
other time in life. And the transition from
middle age to old age creates again the need
for affirmation of the difference between the
ego and the total psyche; the hero receives his
last call to action in defense of ego-conscious-
ness against the approaching dissolution of life
in death.

At these crucial periods, the archetype 4 of
initiation is strongly activated to provide a
meaningful transition that offers something
more spiritually satisfying than the adolescent
rites with their strong secular flavor. The arche-
typal patterns of initiation in this religious sense
known since ancient times as "the mysteries"
are woven into the texture of all ecclesiastical
rituals requiring a special manner of worship at
the time of birth, marriage, or death.

As in our study of the hero myth, so in the
study of initiation we must look for examples
in the subjective experiences of modern people*
and especially of those who have* undergone

analysis. It is not surprising that there should
appear, in the unconscious of someone* who is
seeking help from a doctor specializing in
psychic disorders, image's that duplicate the
major patterns of initiation as we* know them
from history.

Perhaps the commonest of these* themes to be
found in young pee>ple is the orde*al, or trial of
strength. This might seem to be identical with
what we have already noticed in modern
dreams illustrating the here) myth, such as the
sailor who had to submit to the* weather and to
beatings, e>r that proof e>f fitness represented in
the hike thremgh India of the man without a
rain hat. We can alse> see this theme of physical
suffering carrie'd te) its logical end in the first
dream I discussed, when the handsome* young
man became a human sacrifice* em an altar.
This sacrifice resembled the* approach to initia-
tion, but its end was obscured. It seemed te)
re) un d off the hero cycle, to make way for a
new the*me.

There is one striking difference between the
hero myth and the initiation rite. The typical
hero figures exhaust their efforts in achieving
the goal of their ambitions; in short, they
become successful even if immediately after-
ward they are punished or killed for their
hybn.s. In contrast to this, tin 4 novice for initia-
tion is called upon to give up willful ambition

Primitive initiation rituals bring
the youth into adulthood and into
the tribe s collective identity. In
many primitive societies, initiation
is accomplished by circumcision (a
symbolic sacrifice). Here are four
stages in a circumcision rite of
Australian aborigines. Far left, top
and center: The boys are placed
under blankets (a symbolic death
from which they will be reborn).
Bottom, they are removed and held
by the men for the actual operation
Left, the circumcised boys are
given men s conical caps, a mark of
their new status. Right, they are
finally isolated from the tribe to
be purified and given instruction.

A

and all desire and to submit to the ordeal. He
must be willing to experience this trial without
hope of success. In fact, he must be prepared
to die; and though the token of his ordeal may
be mild (a period of fasting, the knocking out
of a tooth, or tattooing) or agonizing (the inflic-
tion of the wounds of circumcision, subincision,
or other mutilations), the purpose remains
always the same: To create the symbolic mood
of death from which may spring the symbolic
mood of rebirth. ,

A young man of 25 dreams of climbing a
mountain on top of which there is a kind of
altar. Near the altar he sees a sarcophagus with
a statue of himself upon it. Then a veiled priest
approaches carrying a staff on which there
glows a living sun-disk. (Discussing the dream
later, the young man said that climbing a
mountain reminded him of the effort he was
making in his analysis to achieve self-mastery.)
To his surprise, he finds himself, as it were,
dead, and instead of a sense of achievement he
feels deprivation and fear. Then comes a feeling
of strength and rejuvenation as he is bathed
in the warm rays of the sun-disk.

This dream shows quite succinctly the dis-
tinction we must make between initiation and
the hero myth. The act of climbing the moun-
tain seems to suggest a trial of strength: It is
the will to achieve ego-consciousness in the
heroic phase of adolescent development. The
patient had evidently thought that his approach
to therapy would be like his approach to other
tests of manhood, which he had approached in
the competitive manner characteristic of young
men in our society. But the scene by the altar
corrected this mistaken assumption, showing
him that his task is rather to submit to a power
greater than himself He must see himself as if
he were dead and entombed in a symbolic form
(the sarcophagus) that recalls the archetypal
mother as the original container of all life. Only
by such an act of submission can he experience
rebirth. An invigorating ritual brings him to life
again as the symbolic son of a Sun Father.

Here again we might confuse this with a hero
cycle — that of the Twins, the “children of the
Sun.” But in this case we have no indication

that the initiate will over-reach himself. Instead,
he has learned a lesson in humility by experi-
encing a rite of death and rebirth that marks
his passage from youth to maturity.

According to his chronological age he should
already have made this transition, but a pro-
longed period of arrested development has held
him back. This delay had plunged him into a
neurosis for which he had come for treatment,
and the dream offers him the same wise counsel
that he could have been given by any good
tribal medicine man — that he should give up
scaling mountains to prove his strength and
submit to the meaningful ritual of an initiatory
change that could fit him for the new moral
responsibilities of manhood.

The theme of submission as an essential
attitude toward promotion of the successful
initiation rite can be clearly seen in the case of
girls or women. Their rite of passage initially
emphasizes their essential passivity, and this is
reinforced by the psychological limitation on
their autonomy imposed by the menstrual cycle.
It has been suggested that the menstrual cycle
may actually be the major part of initiation
from a woman’s point of view, since it has the
power to awaken the deepest sense of obedience
to life’s creative power over her. Thus she will-
ingly gives herself to her womanly function,
much as a man gives himself to his assigned
role in the community life of his group.

On the other hand, the woman, no less than
the man, has her initial trials of strength that

A sarcophagus from second -century
a.d. Thebes that reveals a symbolic
connection with the archetypal Great
Mother (the container of all life).

The inside of the cover bears a portrait
of the Egyptian goddess Nut;
thus the goddess would "embrace"
the body of the deceased (whose
portrait is on the base, far right).

I 3 2

1 33

lead to a final sacrifice for the sake of experi-
encing the new birth. This sacrifice enables a
woman to free herself from the entanglement of
personal relations and fits her for a more con-
scious role as an individual in her own right.
In contrast, a man's sacrifice is a surrender of
his sacred independence: He becomes more
consciously related to woman.

Here we come to that aspect of initiation
which acquaints man with woman and woman
with man in such a way as to correct some sort
of original male-female opposition. Man's
knowledge (Logos) then encounters woman's
related ness (Eros) and their union is represented
as that symbolic ritual of a sacred marriage
which has been at the heart of initiation since
its origins in the mystery-religions of antiquity.
But this is exceedingly difficult for modern
people to grasp, and it frequently takes a special
crisis in their lives to make them understand it.

Several patients have told me dreams in
which the motif of sacrifice is combined w ith
the motif of the sacred marriage. One of these
was produced by a young man who had fallen
in love but was unwilling to marry for fear that
marriage would become a kind of prison pre-
sided over by a powerful mother figure. His
own mother had been a strong influence in his
childhood, and his future mother-in-law pre-
sented a similar threat. Would not his wife-to-

Four varied initiation ceremonies:

Top left, novices in a convent
perform such humble duties as
scrubbing a floor (from the 1 958
film The Nun's Story), and have
their hair cut off (from a medieval
painting) Center, ship s passengers
crossing the equator must undergo a
"rite of passage." Bottom, American
college freshmen in a traditional
battle with their seniors

Marriage can be seen as an initiation
rite in which the man and the woman
must submit to one another. But in
some societies the man offsets his
submission by ritually abducting"
his bride— as do the Dyaksof Malaysia
and Borneo (right, from the 1 955
film The Lost Continent) A remnant
of this practice exists in today's
custom of carrying the bride across
the threshold (far right).

■ 3-1

be dominate him in the same way these mothers
had dominated their children ?

In his dream he was engaged in a ritual
dance along with another man and two other
women, one of whom was his fiancee. The
others were an older man and wife, who im-
pressed the dreamer because, despite 4 their close-
ness to each other, they seemed to have room
for their individual differences, and did not
appear to be possessive. These tw r o therefore
represented to this young man a married stale
that did not impose undue constraint on the
development of the individual nature 4 of the* two
partners. If it were possible for him to achieve
this condition, marriage would then become
acceptable to him.

In the ritual dance each man faced his
woman partner, and all four took their places
at the corners of a square dancing gfound. As
they danced, it became apparent that this was
also a kind of sword dance. Each dancer had
in his hand a short sword with which to per-
form a difficult arabesque, moving arms and
legs in a series of movements that suggested
alternate impulses of aggression and submission
to each other. In the final scene of the dance
all four dancers had to plunge the swords into
their own breasts and die. Only the dreamer
refused to accomplish the final suicide 4 , and was
left standing alone after the others had fallen.

He felt deeply ashamed of his cowardly failure
to sacrifice himself w ith the others.

This dream brought home to my patient the
fact that he was more than ready to change
his attitude to life. He had been self-centered,
seeking the illusory safety of* personal indepen-
dence 4 but inwardly dominated by the fears
caused by childhood subjection to his mother.
He needed a challenge to his manhood in order
to see that unless he 4 sacrificed his childish state*
of mind lu* would be* left isolated and ashamed.
The 4 dream, and his subsequent insight into its
meaning, dispelled his doubts. He had passed
through the 4 symbolic rite 4 by which a young
man gives up his exclusive* autonomy and
accepts his shared life 4 in a related, not just
heroic, form.

And so he 4 married and found appropriate
fulfillment in his relationship with his wife. Far
from impairing his effectiveness in the* world,
his marriage 4 actually enhanced it.

Quite apart from the* neuuotic fear that
invisible* mothers or lalhcTs may be* lurking
behind the* marriage* veil, even the* normal
voung man has good re*ason to fe*c*l apprehen-
sive about the wedding ritual. It is e 4 ssc*ntially
a woman's initiation rite*, in which a man is
bound to feed like anything but a conquering
hero. No wonder we* find, in tribal societie-s,
such counlcrphobic rituals as the* abduction or

rape of the bride. These enable the man to
cling to the remnants of his heroic role at the
very moment that he must submit to his bride
and assume the responsibilities of marriage.

But the theme of marriage is an image of
such universality that it also has a deeper mean-
ing. It is an acceptable, even necessary, sym-
bolic discovery of the feminine component of a
man’s own psyche, just as much as it is the
acquisition of a real wife. So one may encoun-
ter this archetype in a man of any age in
response to a suitable stimulus.

Not all women, however, react trustingly to
the married state. A woman patient who had
unfulfilled longings for a career, which she had
had to give up for a very difficult and short-
lived marriage, dreamed that she was kneeling
opposite a man who was also kneeling. He had
a ring that he prepared to put on her finger,
but she stretched out her right-hand ring finger
in a tense manner — evidently resisting this
ritual of marital union.

It was easy to point out her significant error.
Instead of offering the left-hand ring finger (by

which she could accept a balanced and natural
relation to the masculine principle) she had
wrongly assumed that she had to put her entire
conscious (i.e. right-sided) identity in the ser-
vice of the man. In fact, marriage required her
to share with him only that subliminal, natural
(i.e. left-sided) part of herself in which the
principle of union would have a symbolic, not
a literal or absolute, meaning. Her fear was the
fear of the woman who dreads to lose her
identity in a strongly patriarchal marriage,
which this woman had good reason to resist.

Nevertheless, the sacred marriage as an
archetypal form has a particularly important
meaning for the psychology of women, and one
for which they are prepared during their ado-
lescence by many preliminary events of an
initiatory character.

The archetypal sacred marriage (the
union of opposites, of the male and
female principles) represented here
by a 1 9th-century Indian sculpture
of the deities Siva and Parvati.

Beauty and the Beast

Girls in our society share in the masculine hero
myths because, like boys, they must also de-
velop a reliable ego-identity and acquire an
education. But there is an older layer of the
mind that seems to come to the surface in their
feelings, with the aim of making them into
women, not into imitation men. When this
ancient content of the psyche begins to make
its appearance, the modern young woman may
repress it because it threatens to cut her off'
from the emancipated equality of friendship
and opportunity to compete with men that
have become her modern privileges.

This repression may be so successful that for
a time she will maintain an identification with
the masculine intellectual goals she learned at
school or college. Even when she marries, she
will preserve some illusion of freedom, despite
her ostensible act of submission to the archetype
of marriage — with its implicit injunction to
become a mother. And so there may occur, as
we very frequently see today, that conflict
which in the end forces the woman to redis-
cover her buried womanhood in a painful (but
ultimately rewarding) manner.

I saw an example of this in a young married
woman who did not yet have any children but
who intended to have one or two eventually,
because it would be expected of her. Mean-
while her sexual response was unsatisfactory.
This worried her and her husband, though they
were unable to offer any explanation for it.
She had graduated with honors from a good
women’s college and enjoyed a life of intellec-
tual companionship with her husband and other
men. Although this side of her life went well
enough much of the time, she had occasional
outbursts of temper and talked in an aggressive
fashion that alienated men and gave her an in-
tolerable feeling of dissatisfaction with herself.

She had a dream at this time that seemed so
important she sought professional advice to
understand it. She dreamed she was in a line

of young women like herself, and as she looked
ahead to where they were going she saw that as
each came to the head of the line she was de-
capitated by a guillotine. Without any fear the
dreamer remained in the line, presumably quite
willing to submit to the same treatment when
her turn came.

I explained to her that this meant she was
ready to give up the habit of “living in her
head”; she must learn to free her body to dis-
cover its natural sexual response and the fulfill-
ment of its biological role in motherhood. The
dream expressed this as the need to make a
drastic change; she had to sacrifice the “mascu-
line” hero role.

As one might expect, this educated woman
had no difficulty in accepting this interpretation
at an intellectual level, and she set about trying
to change herself into a more submissive kind
of woman. She did then improve her love-life
and became the mother of two very satisfactory
children. As she grew to know herself better,
she began to see that for a man (or the mascu-
line-trained mind in women) life is something
that has to be taken by storm, as an act of the
heroic will ; but for a woman to feel right about
herself, life is best realized by a process of
awakening.

A universal myth expressing this kind of
awakening is found in the fairy tale of Beauty
and the Beast. The best-known version of this
story relates how Beauty, the youngest of four
daughters, becomes her father’s favorite because
of her unselfish goodness. When she asks her
father only for a white rose, instead of the more
costly presents demanded by the others, she is
aware only of her inner sincerity of feeling. She
docs not know that she is about to endanger
her father’s life and her ideal relation with him.
For he steals the white rose from the enchanted
garden of Beast, who is stirred to anger by the
theft and requires him to return in three
months for his punishment, presumably death.

l 37

fin allowing the father this reprieve to go
home with his gilt. Beast behaves out of char-
acter, especially when he also oilers to send him
a trunk full of gold when he gets home. As
Beauty's father comments, the Beast seems cruel
and kind at the same time.)

Beauty insists upon taking her lather’s pun-
ishment and returns after three months to the
enchanted castle. There she is given a beautiful
room where she has no worries and nothing to
fear except the occasional visits of Beast, who
repeatedly comes to ask her if she will someday
marry him. She always refuses. Then, seeing in
a magic mirror a picture of her father lying ill,
she begs Beast to allow her to return to comfort
him, promising to return in a week. Beast tells
her that he w ill die if she deserts him, but she
may go for a week.

At home, her radiant presence brings joy to
her father and envy to her sisters, who plot to
detain her longer than her promised stav. At
length she dreams that Beast is dying ol despair.
So, realizing she has overstayed her time, she
returns to resuscitate him.

Quite forgetting the dying Beast's ugliness.
Beauty ministers to him. He tells her that lie
was unable to live without her. and that he will
die happy now that she has returned. But
Beauty realizes that she* cannot live without
Beast, that she has fallen in love with him. She
tells him so, and promises to be his wife if onlv
he will not die.

At this the castle is filled with a blaze of light
and the sound of' music, and Beast disappears.
In his place stands a handsome prince, who
tells Beauty that he had been enchanted by a
witch and turned into the Beast. The spell was
ordained to last until a beautiful girl should
love Beast for his goodness alone*.

In this story, if' we unravel th e symbolism, we
are likelv to sea* that Beauty is any young girl
or woman w ho lias entered into an emotional
bond with her father, no less binding because
of its spiritual nature. Her goodness is symbol-
ized by her request for a white* rose, but in a
significant twist of' meaning her unconscious
intention puls her lather and then herself in
the power of a principle* that expresses not
goodness alone, but cruelty and kindness com-
bined. It is as if she* wishe*d to be* re'seued from
a ]e>ve* holding her to an exclusively virtuous
and unreal attitude*.

By learning te> love Beast she* awakens te> the
power of human love* concealed in its animal
i and therefore imperfect! but genuinely erotic
form. Presumably this represents an awakening
of her true* function of relatedness, enabling her
to ac c e pt the* e*re)tic component of her original
wish, which had to be* repressed be*cause ol a
fear ol incest. Te> leave* her father she* had. as
it were*, to accept the* incest-fear. to allow her-
self to live in its presence* in fantasy until she*
could ge t to know the* animal man and discover
her DWti true* response to it as a woman.

Three scenes from the 1 946 film of
Beauty and the Beast (directed by
France’s Jean Cocteau): Left,
Beauty's father caught stealing the
white rose from the Beast's garden,
right, the Beast dying; far right,
the Beast transformed into a Prince,
walking with Beauty. The story can
be said to symbolize a young girl's
initiation — i.e her release from
her bond with the father, in order
to come to terms with the erotic
animal side of her nature Until this
is done, she cannot achieve a true
relationship with a man.

In this way she redeems herself and her
imam* ol the inaseuline from the forces of re-
pression. bringing to consciousness her capacitv
to trust her love as something tliat combines
spirit and nature in the best sense of the words.

A dream of an emancipated woman patient
of mine represented this need to remove the
incest-fear, a very real fear in this patient's
thoughts, because of her father's over-dose
attachment to her following his wife's death.
The dream showed her being chased by a furi-
ous bull. She fled at first, but realized it was no
use. She fell and the bull was upon her. She
knew her only hope was to sing to the bull, and
when she did, though in a quavering voice, the
bull calmed down and began licking her hand
with its tongue. The interpretation showed that
she could now learn to relate to men in a more
confidently feminine way not only sexually,
hut erotically in the w ider sense of relatedness
on the level of her conscious identity.

But in the cases of older women, tin* Beast
theme may not indicate the need to find the
answer to a personal fixation or to release
a sexual inhibition, or any of the things that
the psychoanalytically minded rationalist may
sec in the myth. It can Ik*, in fact, the expres-
sion ol a certain kind of woman's initiation,
which may be just as meaningful at the onset
of the menopause as at the height of adoles-
cence; and it may appear at any age, when the
union of spirit and nature has been disturbed.

A woman of* menopausal age reported the
following dream :

I am with several anonymous women whom I
don't seem to know. We go downstairs in a
strange house, and are confronted suddenly by
some grotesque “ape-men" with evil faces dressed
in fur with gray and black rings, with tails, hor-
rible and leering. We are completely in their
power, hut suddenly I feel the only way we can
save ourselves is not to panic and run or light,
hut to treat these creatures with humanity as il
to make them aware of their better side. So one
of the ape-men comes up to me and I greet him
like a dancing partner and begin to dance with
him.

Later, I have been given supernatural healing
powers and there is a man who is at death's door.
I have a kind ol* quill or perhaps a bird's beak
through which I blow air into his nostrils and he*
begins to breathe again.

During the years of her marriage* and the
raising of her children, this woman had been
obliged to ncglcd her creative gilt, w ith which
she had once made a small but genuine reputa-
tion as a w riter. At the* time of* her dream she
had been trving to force herself back to work
again, at the* same time critic izing herself un-
mercifullv for not be ing a belter wile*, friend,
and mother. The dream showed her problem
in the* light of other women who might be* going
through a similar transition, descending, as the*
dream puts it, into the* lower regions of a
strange* house* from a too highly conscious level.

This we can guess to be the entrance to some
meaningful aspect of the collective unconscious,
with its challenge to accept the masculine prin-
ciple as animal-man, that same heroic, clown-
like Trickster figure we met at the beginning
of the primitive hero cycles.

For her to relate to this ape-man, and hu-
manize him by bringing out what is good in
him, meant that she would first have to accept
some unpredictable element of her natural
creative spirit. With this she could cut across
the conventional bonds of her life and learn to
write in a new way, more appropriate for her
in the second part of life.

That this impulse is related to the creative
masculine principle is shown in the second scene
where she resuscitates a man by blowing air
through a kind of bird's beak into his nose.
This pneumatic procedure suggests the need for
a revival of the spirit rather than the principle
of erotic warmth. It is a symbolism known all
over the world: The ritual act brings the
creative breath of life to any new achievement.

The dream of another woman emphasizes
the “nature" aspect of Beauty and the Beast:

Something flies or is thrown in through the
window, like a large insect with whirling spiral
legs, yellow and black. It then becomes a queer
animal, striped yellow and black, like a tiger, with
bear-like, almost human paws and a pointed wolf-
like face. It may run loose and harm children.
It is Sunday afternoon, and I see a little girl all
dressed in white on her way to Sunday school.
I must get the police to help.

But then I see the creature has become part
woman, part animal. It fawns upon me, wants to
be loved. I feel it's a fairy-tale situation, or a
dream, and only kindness can transform it. I try
to embrace it warmly, but I can't go through with
it. I push it away. But I have the feeling I must
keep it near and get used to it and maybe some-
day I'll be able to kiss it.

Here we have a different situation from the
previous one. This woman had been too inten-
sively carried away by the masculine creative
function within herself, which had become a
compulsive, mental (that is, “air-borne”) pre-
occupation. Thus she has been prevented from

discharging her feminine, wifely function in a
natural way. (In association to this dream she
said: “When my husband comes home, my
creative side goes underground and I become
the over-organized housewife.”) Her dream
takes this unexpected turn of transforming her
spirit gone bad into the woman she must accept
and cultivate in herself; in this way she can
harmonize her creative intellectual interests
with the instincts that enable her to relate
warmly to others.

This involves a new acceptance of the dual
principle of life in nature, of that which is cruel
but kind, or, as we might say in her case, ruth-
lessly adventurous but at the same time humbly
and creatively domestic. These opposites obvi-
ously cannot be reconciled except on a highly
sophisticated psychological level of awareness,
and would of course be harmful to that inno-
cent child in her Sunday-school dress.

The interpretation one could place on this
woman's dream is that she needed to overcome
some excessively naive image of herself. She had
to be willing to embrace the full polarity of her
feelings— just as Beauty had to give up the
innocence of trusting in a father who could not
give her the pure white rose of his feeling with-
out awakening the beneficent fury of the Beast.

Above, the Greek god Dionysus
ecstatically playing the lute (in a
vase painting). The frenzied and
orgiastic rites of the Dionysiac
cults symbolized initiation into
nature's mysteries. Right, Maenads
worshiping Dionysus; far right,
satyrs in the same wild worship.

140

r

Orpheus and the Son of Man

“Beauty and the Beast” is a fairy tale with the
quality of a wild flower, appearing so unexpect-
edly and creating in us such a natural sense of
wonder that we do not notice for the moment
that it belongs to a definite class, genus, and
species of plant. The kind of mystery inherent
in such a story is given a universal application
not only in a larger historical myth, but also in
the rituals whereby the myth is expressed or
from which it may be derived.

The type of ritual and myth appropriately
expressing this type of psychological experience
is exemplified in the Greco-Roman religion of
Dionysus, and in its successor, the religion of
Orpheus. Both of these religions provided a
significant initiation of the type known as “mys-
teries.” They brought forth symbols associated
with a god-man of androgynous character who
was supposed to have an intimate understand-
ing of the animal or plant world and to be
the master of initiation into their secrets.

The Dionysiac religion contained orgiastic
rites that implied the need for an initiate to

abandon himself to his animal nature and
thereby experience the full fertilizing power of
the Earth Mother. The initiating agent for this
rite of passage in the Dionysiac ritual was wine.
It was supposed to produce the symbolic lower-
ing of consciousness necessary to introduce the
novice into the closely guarded secrets of
nature, whose essence was expressed by a sym-
bol of' erotic fulfillment: the god Dionysus
joined with Ariadne, his consort, in a sacred
marriage ceremony.

In time the rites of Dionysus lost their emo-
tive religious power. There emerged an almost
oriental longing for liberation from their exclu-
sive preoccupation with the purely natural sym-
bols of life and love. The Dionysiac religion,
shifting constantly from spiritual to physical
and back again, perhaps proved too wild and
turbulent for some more ascetic souls. These
came to experience their religious ecstasies in-
wardly, in the worship of Orpheus.

Orpheus was probably a real man, a singer,
prophet, and teacher, who was martyred and

141

whose tomb became a shrine. No wonder the
early Christian church saw in Orpheus the pro-
totype of Christ. Both religions brought to the
late Hellenistic world the promise of a future
divine life. Because they were men, yet also
mediators of the divine, for the multitudes of
the dying Grecian culture in the days of the
Roman Empire they held the longed-for hope
of a future life.

There was, however, one important differ-
ence between the religion of* Orpheus and the
religion of Christ. Though sublimated into a
mystical form, the Orphic mysteries kept alive
the old Dionvsiac religion. The spiritual im-
petus came from a demi-god. in whom was
preserved the most significant quality of a
religion rooted in the art of agriculture. That
quality was the old pattern of the fertility gods
who came only for the season in other words,
the eternally recurrent cycle of birth, growth,
fullness, and decay.

Christianity, on the other hand, dispelled the
mysteries. Christ was the product and reformer
of a patriarchal, nomadic, pastoral religion,
whose prophets represented their Messiah as a
being of absolutely divine origin. The Son of
Man, though born of a human virgin, had his
beginning in heaven, whence he came in an

act of God's incarnation in man. After his
death, he returned to heaven but returned
once and lor all, to reign on the right hand of
God until the Second Coming ‘"when the dead
shall arise."

Of course the asceticism of early Christianity
did not last. The memory of the cyclic mysteries
haunted its followers to the extent that the
Church eventually had to incorporate many
practices from the pagan past into its rituals.
The most meaningful of* these may be found in
the old records of what was done on Holy
Saturday and Raster Sunday in celebration of
the resurrection of Christ the baptismal ser-
vice that the mediev al church made into a suit-
able and deeply meaningful initiation rile. But
that ritual has scarcely survived into modern
times, and it is completely absent in Pro-
testantism.

The ritual that has survived much better,
and that still contains the meaning of a central
initiation mystery for the devout, is the Catholic
practice of the elevation of the chalice. It has
been described by Dr. Jung in his "Transfor-
mation Symbolism in the Mass":

" The lifting up of the chalice in tin* air pre-
pares the spiritualization . . . of the wine. This
is confirmed by the invocation to the Holy

t 4 2

iliilfePSijiK

Ghost that immediately follows. . . . The invo-
cation serves to infuse the' wine' with holy spirit,
for it is the Holy Ghost who begets, fulfills, and
transforms. . . . After the elevation, the chalice
was, in former times, set down to the right of
the Host, to correspond with the blood that
flowed from the right side of Christ."

The ritual of communion is everywhere the
same, whether it is expressed bv drinking of the
cup of Dionysus or of the holy Christian cha-
lice; but the level of awareness each brings to
the individual participant is different. The
Dionysiac participant looks back to the origin
of things, to the “storm-birth'' of the god who
is blasted from the resistant womb of Mother
Earth. In the frescoes of the Villa de Misteri in
Pompeii, the enacted rite evoked the god as a
mask of terror reflected in the cup of Dionysus
offered by the priest to the initiate. Later we
find the winnowing basket, with its precious
fruits of the earth, and the phallus as creative
symbols of the god's manifestation as the prin-
ciple of breeding and growth.

In contrast to this backward look, with its
central focus on nature's eternal cycle of birth
and death, the Christian mystery points for-
ward to the initiate's ultimate hope of union
with a transcendent god. Mother Nature, with

Above, a Dionysiac ritual depicted
on the great fresco in the Villa
of the Mysteries at Pompeii. In
the center an initiate is offered
the ceremonial cup of Dionysus, in
which he sees a reflection of the
god-mask held behind. This is a
symbolic infusion of the drink with
the god s spirit — which can be said
to parallel the Roman Catholic
ceremony of elevating the chalice
during Mass (below)

>43

Left, Orpheus charming the beasts
with his song (in a Roman mosaic);
above, the murder of Orpheus by
Thracian women (on a Greek vase).
Below left Christ as the Good
Shepherd (a sixth-century mosaic).
Both Orpheus and Christ parallel
the archetype of the man of nature
— also reflected in the painting by
Cranach (below) of "natural man’s"
innocence. Facing page, left, the
18th-century French philosopher
Rousseau, who put forward the idea
of the "noble savage" — the simple
child of nature free of sin and evil.

Far right, the title page of Walden,
by the 1 9th -century American writer
Thoreau, who believed in and followed
a natural way of life almost wholly
independent of civilization.

144

all her beautiful seasonal changes, has been left
behind, and the central figure of Christianity
offers spiritual certainty, for he is the Son of
God in heaven.

Yet the two somehow fuse in the figure of
Orpheus, the god who remembers Dionysus but
looks forward to Christ. The psychological
sense of this intermediate figure has been de-
scribed by the Swiss author Linda Fierz-David,
in her interpretation of the Orphic rite pictured
in the Villa de Misteri:

“Orpheus taught while he sang and played
the lyre, and his singing was so powerful that
it mastered all nature; when he sang to his
lyre the birds flew about him, the fish left the
water and sprang to him. The wind and the
sea became still, the rivers flowed upward to-
ward him. It did not snow' and there was no
hail. Trees and the very stones followed after
Orpheus; tiger and lion lay down near him
next to the sheep, and the wolves next to the
stag and the roe. Now what does this mean?
It surely means that through a divine insight
into the meaning of natural events . . . nature's
happenings become harmoniously ordered from
within. Everything becomes light and all crea-
tures appeased when the mediator, in the
act of worshiping, represents the light of nature.
Orpheus is an embodiment of devotion and
piety; he symbolizes the religious attitude that
solves all conflicts, since thereby the whole soul
is turned toward that which lies on the other
side of all conflict. . . . And as he does this, he
is truly Orpheus; that is, a good shepherd, his
primitive embodiment. . .

Both as good shepherd and as mediator,
Orpheus strikes the balance between the Dio-
nysiac religion and the Christian religion, since
we find both Dionysus and Christ in similar
roles, though, as I have said, differently orien-
ted as to time and direction in space one a
cyclic religion of the nether world, the other
heavenly and eschatological, or final. This series
of initiatory events, drawn from the context of
religious history, is repeated endlessly and with
practically every conceivable individual tw ist of
meaning in the dreams and fantasies of modern
people.

In a state of heavy fatigue and depression, a
woman undergoing analysis had this fantasy:

I sit on the side of a long narrow table in a
high vaulted room with no window. \ly body is
hunched over and shrunken. There is nothing
over me but a long white linen cloth that hangs
from my shoulders to the floor. Something crucial
has happened to me. There is not much life left
in me. Red crosses on gold disks appear before
mv eyes. I recall that 1 have made some sort of
commitment a long time ago and wherever I am
now’ must be part of this. I sit there a long time.

Now I slowly open my eyes and I see a man
who sits beside me who is to heal me. He appears
natural and kind and he is talking to me though
1 don’t hear him. He seems to know all about
where I have been. I am aware that I am very
ugly and that there must be an odor of death
around me. I wonder if he will be repelled. I look
at him for a very long time. He does not turn
away. I breathe more easily.

Then I feel a cool breeze, or cool water, pour
over my body. I wrap the white linen cloth across
me now and prepare for a natural sleep. The
man’s healing hands are on my shoulders. I recall
vaguely that there was a time when there were
wounds there but the pressure of his hands seems
to give me strength and healing.

This woman had previously felt threatened
by doubts about her original religious affilia-
tion. She had been brought up as a devout

145

m

Catholic of the old school, but since her youth
she had struggled to free herself from the
formal religious conventions followed by her
family. Yet the symbolic events of the church
year and the richness of her insight into their
meaning remained with her throughout the
process of her psychological change; and in her
analysis I found this working knowledge of
religious symbolism most helpful.

The significant elements she singled out of'
her fantasy were the white cloth, which she
understood as a sacrificial cloth; the vaulted
room, which she considered to be a tomb; and
her commitment, which she associated with the
experience of submission. This commitment, as
she called it, suggested a ritual of initiation with
a perilous descent into the vault of death, which
symbolized the way she had left church and
family to experience God in her own fashion.
She had undergone an “imitation of Christ" in
the true symbolic sense, and like him she had
suffered the wounds that preceded this death.

The sacrificial cloth suggests the winding
sheet or shroud in which the crucified Christ
was wrapped and then placed in the tomb. The
end of the fantasy introduces the healing figure
of a man, loosely associated with me as her
analyst but appearing also in his natural role
as a friend fully aware of her experience. He
speaks to her in words she cannot yet hear, but
his hands are reassuring and give a sense of
healing. One senses in this figure the touch and
the word of the good shepherd, Orpheus or
Christ, as mediator and also, of course, as
healer. He is on the side of life and has to con-
vince her that she may now come back from
the vault of death.

Shall we call this rebirth or resurrection?
Both, perhaps, or neither. The essential rite pro-
claims itself at the end: The cool breeze or
water flowing over her body is the primordial
act of purification or cleansing of the sin of
death, the essence of true baptism.

The same woman had another fantasy in
which she felt that her birthday fell upon the
day of Christ’s resurrection. (This was much
more meaningful for her than the memory of
her mother, who had never given her the feel-

146

ing of reassurance and renewal she so much
wished for on her childhood birthdays.) But
this did not mean she identified herself with
the figure of Christ. For all his power and
glory, something was lacking; and as she tried
to reach him through prayer, he and his
cross were lifted up to heaven out of her
human reach.

In this second fantasy she fell back upon the
symbol of rebirth as a rising sun, and a new
feminine symbol began to make its appearance.
First of all it appeared as an “embryo in a
watery sack/' Then she was carrying an eight-
year-old boy through the water “passing a
danger point.” Then a new movement occurred
in which she no longer felt threatened or under
the influence of death. She was “in a forest by
a little spring waterfall . . . green vines grow all
around. In my hands I have a stone bowl in
which there is spring water, some green moss,
and violets. I bathe myself under the waterfall.
It is golden and ‘silky’ and I feel like a child.”

The sense of these events is clear, though it is
possible to miss the inner meaning in the cryp-
tic description of so many changing images.
Here we have, it seems, a process of rebirth in
which a larger spiritual self is reborn and bap-
tized in nature as a child. Meanwhile she has
rescued an older child who was, in some way,
her own ego at the most traumatic period of
her childhood. She then carried it through
water past the danger point, thus indicating her
fear of a paralyzing sense of guilt if she should

depart too far from her family’s conventional
religion. But religious symbolism is significant
by its absence. All is in the hands of nature ; we
are clearly in the realm of the shepherd
Orpheus rather than the risen Christ.

A dream followed this sequence, which
brought her to a church resembling the church
in Assisi with Giotto’s frescoes of St. Francis.
She felt more at home here than she would in
other churches because St. Francis, like
Orpheus, was a religious man of nature. This
revived her feelings about the change in her
religious affiliation that had been so painful to
undergo, but now she believed she could joy-
fully face the experience, inspired by the light
of nature.

The series of dreams ended with a distant
echo of the religion of Dionysus. (One could
say that this was a reminder that even Orpheus
can at times be a little too far removed from
the fecundating power of the animal-god in
man.) She dreamed that she was leading a fair-
haired child by the hand. “We are happily
participating in a festival that includes the sun
and the forests and flowers all around. The
child has a little white flower in her hand, and
she places it on the head of a black bull. The
bull is part of the festival and is covered with
festive decorations.” This reference recalls the
ancient rites that celebrated Dionysus in the
guise of a bull.

But the dream did not end there. The
woman added: “Some time later the bull is

Above left, the Persian god Mithras
sacrificing the bull. The sacrifice
(also part of Dionysiac rites) can
be seen as a symbol of the victory
of man's spiritual nature over his
animality — of which the bull is a
common symbol. (This may explain
the popularity in some countries
of bullfighting, left.) Right, an
etching by Picasso (1 935) depicts
a girl threatened by a Minotaur —
here, as in the myth of Theseus,
a symbol of man's uncontrollable
instinctive forces.

pierced by a golden arrow.” Now, besides
Dionysus, there is another pre-Christian rite in
which the bull plays a symbolic role. The Per-
sian sun-god Mithras sacrifices a bull. He, like
Orpheus, represents the longing for a life of
the spirit that might triumph over the primitive
animal passions of man and, after a ceremony
of initiation, give him peace.

This series of images confirms a suggestion
that is found in many fantasy or dream
sequences of this type that there is no final
peace, no resting point. In their religious quest
men and women — especially those who live in
modern Western Christianized societies are
still in the power of those early traditions that
strive within them for supremacy. It is a con-
flict of pagan or Christian beliefs, or, one might
say, of rebirth or resurrection.

A more direct clue to the solution of* this
dilemma is to be found, in this woman s first
fantasy, in a curious piece of symbolism that
could easily be overlooked. The woman says
that in her death vault she saw before her eyes
a vision of red crosses on gold disks. As became
clear later in her analysis, she was about to ex-
perience a profound psychic change and to
emerge out of this “death” into a new kind of
life. We might imagine, therefore, that this
image, which came to her in the depth of her
despair of life, should in some way herald her
future religious attitude. In her subsequent work
she did in fact produce evidence for thinking
that the red crosses represented her devotion to
the Christian attitude, while the gold disks re-
presented her devotion to the pre-Christian
mystery religions. Her vision had told her that
she must reconcile these Christian and pagan
elements in the new life that lay ahead.

One last, but important, observation con-
cerns the ancient initiation rites and their rela-
tion to Christianity. The initiation rite cele-
brated in the Eleusinian mysteries (the rites of
worship of the fertility goddesses Demeter and
Persephone) was not considered appropriate
merely for those who sought to live life more
abundantly; it was also used as a preparation
for death, as if death also required an initia-
tory rite of passage of the same kind.

On a funeral urn found in a Roman grave
near the Columbarium on the Esquiline Hill we
find a clear bas-relief representing scenes of the
final stage of initiation where the novice is
admitted to the presence and converse of the
goddesses. The rest of the design is devoted to
two preliminary ceremoniesofpurification the
sacrifice of the “mystic pig,” and a mysticized
version of the sacred marriage. This all points
to an initiation into death, but in a form that
lacks the finality of mourning. It hints at that
element of the later mysteries — especially of
Orphism — which makes death carry a promise
of immortality. Christianity went even further.
It promised something more than immortality
(which in the old sense of the cyclic mysteries
might merely mean reincarnation ), for it offered
the faithful an everlasting life in heaven.

So we see again, in modern life, the tendency
to repeat old patterns. Those who have to learn
to face death may have to relearn the old mes-
sage that tells us that death is a mystery for
which we must prepare ourselves in the same
spirit of submission and humility as we once
learned to prepare ourselves for life.

148

Symbols of transcendence

The symbols that influence man vary in their
purpose. Some men need to be aroused, and
experience their initiation in the violence of a
Dionvsiac “thunder rite." Others need to be
subdued, and they are brought to submission in
the ordered design of temple precinct or sacred
cave, suggestive of the Apollonian religion of
later Greece. A full initiation embraces both
themes, as we can see when we look either at
the material drawn from ancient texts or at
living subjects. But it is quite certain that the
fundamental goal of initiation lies in taming the
original Trickster-like wildness of the juvenile
nature. It therefore has a civilizing or spiritu-
alizing purpose, in spite of the violence of the
rites that are required to set this process in
motion.

There is, however, another kind ofsymbolism,
belonging to the earliest known sacred tradi-
tions, that is also connected with the periods of

transition in a person's life. But these symbols
do not seek to integrate the initiate with any
religious doctrine or secular group-conscious-
ness. On the contrary, they point to man's need
for liberation from any state of being that is
too immature, too fixed or final. I n other words,
they concern man's release from or transcend-
ence of any confining pattern of existence, as
he moves toward a superior or more mature
stage in his development.

A child, as I have said, possesses a sense of
completeness, but only before the initial emer-
gence of his ego-consciousness. In the case of an
adult, a sense of completeness is achieved
through a union of the consciousness with the
unconscious contents of the mind. Out of this
union arises what Jung called “the transcend-
ent function of the psyche," by which a man
can achieve his highest goal : the full realization
of the potential of his individual Self.

Both a bird and a shaman (i.e. a
primitive medicine man) are
common symbols of transcendence,
and often are combined: Left, a
prehistoric cave painting at Lascaux
shows a shaman in a bird mask Below,
a shaman priestess of a Siberian
people, in a bird costume. Right,
a shaman's coffin (also Siberian)
with bird figures on the posts.

149

■ucsrui*

Thus, what we call “symbols of transcend-
ence” are the symbols that represent man's
striving to attain this goal. They provide the
means by which the contents of the unconscious
can enter the conscious mind, and they also
are themselves an active expression of those
contents.

These symbols are manifold in form. Whether
we encounter them in history or in the dreams
of contemporary men and women who are at a
critical stage in their lives, we can see their
importance. At the most archaic level of this
symbolism we again meet the Trickster theme.
But this time he no longer appears as a lawless
would-be hero. He has become the shaman-
the medicine man — whose magical practices
and flights of intuition stamp him as a primitive
master of initiation. His power resides in his
supposed ability to leave his body and fly about
the universe as a bird.

In this case the bird is the most fitting symbol
of transcendence. It represents the pecu-
liar nature of intuition working through a
“medium,” that is, an individual who is capable
of obtaining knowledge of distant events — or
facts of which he consciously knows nothing—
by going into a trancelike state.

Evidence of such powers can be found as far
back as the paleolithic period of prehistory, as
the American scholar Joseph Campbell has
pointed out in commenting upon one of the
famous cave paintings recently discovered in
France. At Lascaux, he writes, “there is a sha-
man depicted, lying in a trance, wearing a bird
mask with a figure of a bird perched on a staff
beside him. The shamans of Siberia wear such
bird costumes to this day, and many are be-
lieved to have been conceived by their mothers
from the descent of a bird .... The shaman,
then, is not only a familiar denizen, but even
the favored scion of those realms of power that
are invisible to our normal waking conscious-
ness, which all may visit briefly in vision, but
through which he roams, a master.”

At the highest level of this type of initiatory
activity, far from those tricks-of-the-trade by
which magic so frequently replaces true spiritual
insight, we find the Hindu master yogis. In
their trance states they go far beyond the nor-
mal categories of thought.

One of the commonest dream symbols for
this type of release through transcendence is the
theme of the lonely journey or pilgrimage,
which somehow seems to be a spiritual pilgrim-

ln myths or dreams, a lonely journey
often symbolizes the liberation of
transcendence. Above left, a 1 5th-century
painting of the poet Dante
holding his book (the Divine Comedy)
which relates his dream of a journey
to hell (lower left of picture),
purgatory, and heaven. Far left, an
engraving of the journey made by the
pilgrim in the British author John
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress ( 1 678) .

(Note that the journey is^a circular
movement toward an inner center.)

This book, too, is told as a dream;
left, the pilgrim dreaming.

Many people want some change
from a containing pattern of life;
but the freedom gained by travel
(urged by the “run away to sea"
poster, right) is no substitute
for a true inner liberation.

■ 5 1

age on which the initiate becomes acquainted
with the nature of death. But this is not death
as a last judgment or other initiatory trial of
strength; it is a journey of release, renuncia-
tion, and atonement, presided over and fostered
by some spirit of compassion. This spirit is more
often represented by a “mistress” rather than a
“master” of initiation, a supreme feminine
(i.e. anima) figure such as Kwan-Yin in Chin-
ese Buddhism, Sophia in the Christian-Gnostic
doctrine, or the ancient Greek goddess of
wisdom Pallas Athena.

Not only the flight of birds or the journey
into the wilderness represents this symbolism,
but any strong movement exemplifying release.
In the first part of life, when one is still attached
to the original family and social group, this
may be experienced as that moment of initia-
tion at which one must learn to take the decisive
steps into life alone. It is the moment that
T. S. Eliot describes in “The Waste Land,”
when one faces

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender ,

which an age of prudence can never retract .

At a later period of life one may not need to
break all ties with the symbols of meaningful
containment. But nonetheless one can be filled
with that spirit ofdivine discontent which forces

all free men to face some new discovery or to
live their lives in a new way. This change may
become especially important in the period be-
tween middle age and old age, which is the
time in life when so many people are consider-
ing what to do in their retirement — whether to
work or to play, whether to stay at home or to
travel.

If their lives have been adventurous, insecure,
or full of change, they may long for a settled
life and the consolations of religious certainty.
But if they have lived chiefly within the social
pattern in which they were born, they may
desperately need a liberating change. This need
may be filled, temporarily, by a trip around the
world, or by nothing more than a move to a
smaller house. But none of these external
changes will serve unless there has been some
inner transcendence of old values in creating,
not just inventing, a new pattern of life.

A case of this latter sort is a woman who
had lived in a style of life that she, her family,
and friends had long enjoyed because it was so
well rooted, culturally nourishing, and secure
from transitory fashions. She had this dream:

I found some strange pieces of wood, not
carved but with natural beautiful shapes. Some-

Left, the British explorer R F Scott
and his companions, photographed in
the Antarctic in 1 91 1 . Explorers,
venturing into the unknown, provide
an apt image of the liberation, the
breaking out of containment, that
characterizes transcendence.

The symbol of the snake is commonly
linked with transcendence, because
it was traditionally a creature of
the underworld — and thus was a
"mediator" between one way of life
and another. Right, the snake and
staff symbol of the Greco- Roman
god of medicine Asklepios on a card
used to identify a doctor’s car in
modern France.

* 5 2

one said: '‘Neanderthal man brought them."
Then I saw at a distance these Neanderthal men
looking like a dark mass, but I could not see one
of them distinctly. I thought I would take back
from this place a piece of their wood.

Then I went on, as if on a journey by myself,
and I looked down into an enormous abyss like
an extinct volcano. There was water in part of it
and there I expected to see more Neanderthal
men. But instead I saw black water pigs that had
come out of the water and were running in and
out of the black volcanic rocks.

In contrast to this woman’s family attach-
ments and her highly cultivated style of life,
the dream takes her to a prehistoric period
more primitive than anything we can visualize.
She can find no social group among these
ancient men : She sees them as an embodiment
of a truly unconscious, collective “dark mass'’
in the distance. Yet they are alive, and she may
carry away a piece of their wood. The dream
emphasizes that the wood is natural, not carved ;
therefore it comes from a primordial, not a cul-
turally conditioned, level of the unconscious.
The piece of wood, remarkable for its great age,
links this woman’s contemporary experience to
the distant origins of human life.

We know from many examples that an
ancient tree or plant represents symbolically the

growth and development of psychic life (as
distinct from instinctual life, commonly symbo-
lized by animals). Hence, in this piece of wood,
this woman acquired a symbol of her link with
the deepest layers of the collective unconscious.

Next she speaks of continuing her journey
alone. This theme, as I have already pointed
out, symbolizes the need for release as an initia-
tory experience. So here we have another sym-
bol of transcendence.

Then, in the dream, she sees a huge crater of
an extinct volcano, which has been the channel
for a violent eruption of fire from the deepest
layers of the earth. We can surmise that this
refers to a significant memory trace, which leads
back to a traumatic experience. This she asso-
ciated to a personal experience early in her life
when she had felt the destructive, yet creative,
force of her passions to such an extent that she
feared she would go out of her mind. She had
found, in late adolescence, a quite unexpected
need to break away from her family’s exces-
sively conventional social pattern. She had
achieved this break without serious distress, and
had been able to return eventually to make her
peace with the family. But there lingered a
profound wish to make a still greater differen-
tiation from her family background and to find
freedom from her own pattern of existence.

This dream recalls another. It came from a
young man who had a totally different problem
but who seemed to need a similar type of in-
sight. He too had the urge to achieve differen-
tiation. He dreamed of a volcano, and from its
crater he saw two birds taking flight as if in
fear that the volcano was about to erupt. This
was in a strange, lonely place with a body of
water between him and the volcano. In this
case, the dream represented an individual
initiation journey. ,

It is similar to cases reported among the
simple food-gathering tribes, which are the least
family-conscious groups we know. In these
societies the young initiate must take a lonely
journey to a sacred place (in Indian cultures of
the North Pacific coast, it may actually be a
crater lake) where, in a visionary or trancelike
state, he encounters his “guardian spirit’’ in the

1 53

form of an animal, a bird, or natural object.
He closely identifies himself with this “bush
soul” and thereby becomes a man. Without such
an experience he is regarded, as an Achumaui
medicine man put it, as “an ordinary Indian,
nobody.”

The young man’s dream came at the begin-
ning of his life, and it pointed to his future
independence and identity as a man. The
woman I have described was approaching the
end of her life, and she experienced a similar
journey and seemed to need to acquire a simi-
lar independence. She could live out the re-
mainder of her days in harmony with an eternal
human law that, by its antiquity, transcended
the known symbols of culture.

But such independence does not end in a
state of yogi-like detachment that would mean
a renunciation of the world with all its impuri-
ties. In the otherwise dead and blasted land-
scape of her dream the woman saw signs of
animal life. These are “water pigs,” unknown
to her as a species. They therefore would carry
the meaning of a special type of animal, one
that can live in two environments, in water or
on the earth.

This is the universal quality of the animal as
a symbol of transcendence. These creatures,
figuratively coming from the depths of the
ancient Earth Mother, are symbolic denizens of

the collective unconscious. They bring into the
field of consciousness a special chthonic (under-
world) message that is somewhat different from
the spiritual aspirations symbolized by the birds
in the young man's dream.

Other transcendent symbols of the depths are
rodents, lizards, snakes, and sometimes fish.
These are intermediate creatures that combine
underwater activity and the bird-flight with an
intermediate terrestrial life. The wild duck or
the swan are cases in point. Perhaps the com-
monest dream symbol of transcendence is the
snake, as represented by the therapeutic symbol
of the Roman god of medicine Aesculapius,
which has survived to modern times as a sign
of the medical profession. This was originally
a nonpoisonous tree snake; as we see it, coiled
around the staff of the healing god, it seems to
embody a kind of mediation between earth and
heaven.

A still more important and widespread sym-
bol of chthonic transcendence is the motif of
the two entwined serpents. These are the famous
Naga serpents of ancient India; and we also
find them in Greece as the entwined serpents
on the end of the staff belonging to the god
Hermes. An early Grecian herm is a stone
pillar with a bust of the god above. On one side
are the entwined serpents and on the other an
erect phallus. As the serpents are represented

Left a 1 7th-century French painting
reveals the snake's role as mediator
between this world and the next.
Orpheus is playing his lyre; he
and his audience fail to notice
that Eurydice (center of picture)
has been bitten by a snake— a fatal
wound that symbolizes her descent
into the underworld.

Above, the Egyptian god Thoth with
the head of a bird (an ibis), in a
relief from c. 350 b.c. Thoth is
an "underworld'' figure associated
with transcendence; it was he who
judged the souls of the dead. The
Greek god Hermes, who was called
"psycho-pomp" (soul-guide), had
the function of guiding the dead
to the underworld. Left, a stone
herm, which was placed at cross-
roads (symbolizing the god's role
as a mediator between two worlds).
On the side of the herm is a
snake twined around a staff; this
symbol (the caduceus) was carried
over to the Roman god Mercury
(right, a 1 6th-century Italian
bronze), who also acquired wings,
recalling the bird as a symbol of
spiritual transcendence.

>55

in the act of sexual union and the erect phallus
is unequivocally sexual, we can draw certain
conclusions about the function of the herm as a
symbol of fertility.

But we are mistaken if we think this only
refers to biological fertility. Hermes is Trickster
in a different role as a messenger, a god of the
cross-roads, and finally the leader of souls to
and from the underworld. His phallus therefore
penetrates from the known into the unknown
world, seeking a spiritual message ofdeliverance
and healing.

Originally in Egypt Hermes was known as
the ibis-headed god Thoth, and therefore was
conceived as the bird form of the transcendent
principle. Again, in the Olympian period of
Greek mythology, Hermes recovered attributes
of the bird life to add to his chthonic nature as
serpent. His staff acquired wings above the ser-
pents, becoming the caduceus or winged staff
of Mercury, and the god himself became the
“flying man” with his winged hat and sandals.

Here we see his full power of transcendence,
whereby the lower transcendence from under-
world snake-consciousness, passing through the
medium of earthly reality, finally attains trans-
cendence to superhuman or transpersonal
reality in its winged flight.

Such a composite symbol is found in other
representations as the winged horse or winged
dragon or other creatures that abound in the
artistic expressions of alchemy, so fully illus-
trated in Dr. Jung’s classic work on this subject.
We follow the innumerable vicissitudes of these
symbols in our work with patients. They show
what our therapy can expect to achieve when
it liberates the deeper psychic contents so that
they can beqome part of our conscious equip-
ment for understanding life more effectively.

It is not easy for modern man to grasp the
significance of the symbols that come down to
us from the past or that appear in our dreams.
Nor is it easy to see how the ancient conflict
between symbols of containment and liberation

(Oivar fix
Mf cW
futniian

<TWC-

t him coin (ffctntnx

vctvniv o'
ttw.linfmrpwt’ crinciNu*
itv

Winged dragons (above, from a 1 5th-
century manuscript) combine the
transcendent symbolism of the snake
and the bird Right, an image of
spiritual transcendence: Mohammed
on the winged mare Buraq flies
through the celestial spheres.

156

'

relates to our own predicament. Yet it becomes
easier when we realize it is only the specific
forms of these archaic patterns that change,
not their psychic meaning.

We have been talking of wild birds as sym-
bols of release or liberation. But today we could
as well speak of jet planes and space rockets,
for they are the physical embodiment of the
same transcendent principle, freeing us at least
temporarily from gravity. In the same way the
ancient symbols of containment, which once
gave stability and protection, now appear in
modern man’s search for economic security
and social welfare.

Any of us can see, of course, that there is a
conflict in our lives between adventure and dis-
cipline, or evil and virtue, or freedom and
security. But these are only phrases we use to
describe an ambivalence that troubles us, and
to which we never seem able to find an answer.

There is an answer. There is a meeting point
between containment and liberation, and we
can find it in the rites of initiation that I have
been discussing. They can make it possible for
individuals, or whole groups of people, to unite
the opposing forces within themselves and
achieve an equilibrium in their lives.

But the rites do not offer this opportunity
invariably, or automatically. They relate to
particular phases in the life of an individual, or
of a group, and unless they are properly under-
stood and translated into a new way of life, the
moment can pass. Initiation is, essentially, a
process that begins with a rite of submission,
followed by a period of containment, and then
by a further rite of liberation. In this way every
individual can reconcile theconfiictingelements
of his personality: He can strike a balance that
makes him truly human, and truly the master
of himself.

In the dreams and fantasies of many
modern people, the flights of the
great rockets of space research
have often appeared as symbolic
20th-century embodiments of the
urge toward liberation and release
that is called transcendence.

157

3 The process of individuation

M.-L. von Franz

The rose window of the cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris

The process of individuation

The pattern of psychic growth

At the beginning of this book Dr. C. G. Jung
introduced the reader to the concept of the un-
conscious, its personal and collective structures,
and its symbolic mode of expression. Once one
has seen the vital importance (that is, the heal-
ing or destructive impact) of the symbols pro-
duced by the unconscious, there remains the
difficult problem ofinterpretation. Dr. Jung has
shown that everything depends on whether any
particular interpretation “clicks” and is mean-
ingful to the individual concerned. In this way
he has indicated the possible meaning and func-
tion of dream symbolism.

But, in the development of Jung's theory,
this possibility raised another question: What
is the purpose of the total dream life of the in-
dividual? What role do dreams play, not only
in the immediate psychic economy of the hu-
man being, but in his life as a whole?

By observing a great many people and study-
ing their dreams (he estimated that he inter-
preted at least 80,000 dreams), Jung discovered
not only that all dreams are relevant in varying
degrees to the life of the dreamer, but that they
are all parts of one great web of psychological
factors. He also found that, on the whole, they
seem to follow an arrangement or pattern. This
pattern Jung called "the process of individua-
tion.” Since dreams produce different scenes
and images every night, people who are not
careful observers will probably be unaware of
any pattern. But if one watches one’s own
dreams over a period of years and studies the
entire sequence, one will see that certain con-
tents emerge, disappear, and then turn up
again. Many people even dream repeatedly of
the same figures, landscapes, or situations; and
if one follows these through a whole series, one
will see that they change slowly but perceptibly.
These changes can be accelerated if the dream-
er's conscious attitude is influenced by appro-
priate interpretation of the dreams and their
symbolic contents.

160

Below, a "meander'* (a decoration
in a seventh-century manuscript)
Individual dreams seem as strange
and fragmented as the detail, above
from the decoration; but over a
lifetime s dreaming, a meandering
pattern appears --revealing the
process of psychic growth

A

Ego

Thus our dream life creates a meandering
pattern in which individual strands or tenden-
cies become visible, then vanish, then return
again. If one watches this meandering design
over a long period of time, one can observe a
sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency
at work, creating a slow, imperceptible process
of psychic growth the process ofindividuation.

Gradually a wider and more mature person-
ality emerges, and by degrees becomes effective
and even visible to others. The fact that we
often speak of "‘arrested development" shows
that we assume that such a process of growth
and maturation is possible with every indivi-
dual. Since this psychic growth cannot be
brought about by a conscious effort of will
power, but happens involuntarily and natur-
ally, it is in dreams frequently symbolized by
the tree, whose slow, powerful, involuntary
growth fulfills a definite pattern.

The organizing center from which the regu-
latory effect stems seems to be a sort of "nu-
clear atom" in our psychic system. One could
also call it the inventor, organizer, and source
of dream images. Jung called this center the
"Self" and described it as the totality of the
whole psyche, in order to distinguish it from
the "ego," which constitutes only a small part of
the total psyche.

Throughout the ages men have been intui-
tively aware of the existence of such an inner
center. The Greeks called it man's inner dai-
mon; in Egypt it was expressed by the concept
of the Ba-soul\ and the Romans worshiped it
as the "genius" native to each individual. In
more primitive societies it was often thought of
as a protective spirit embodied within an
animal or a fetish.

T his inner center is realized in exceptionally
pure, unspoiled form by the Naskapi Indians,
who still exist in the forests of the Labrador
peninsula. These simple people are hunters who
live in isolated family groups, so far from one

The psyche can be compared to a
sphere with a bright field (A) on its
surface, representing consciousness.

The ego is the field's center (only if
"I" know a thing is it conscious)

The Self is at once the nucleus
and the whole sphere (B), its internal
regulating processes produce dreams.

another that they have not been able to evolve
tribal customs or collective religious beliefs and
ceremonies. In his lifelong solitude the Naskapi
hunter has to rely on his own inner voices and
unconscious revelations; he has no religious
teachers who tell him what he should believe,
no rituals, festivals, or customs to help him
along. In his basic view of life, the soul of man
is simply an "inner companion," whom he calls
"my friend" or Mista'peo , meaning "Great
Man." Mista’peo dwells in the heart and is im-
mortal; in the moment of death, or shortly
before, he leaves the individual, and later re-
incarnates himself in another being.

Those Naskapi who pay attention to their
dreams and who try to find their meaning and
test their truth can enter into a deeper connec-
tion with the Great Man. He favors such
people and sends them more and better dreams.
Thus the major obligation of an individual
Naskapi is to follow the instructions given by
his dreams, and then to give permanent form
to their contents in art. Lies and dishonesty
drive the Great Man away from one's inner
realm, whereas generosity and love of one's
neighbors and of animals attract him and give

i b i

him life. Dreams give the Naskapi complete
ability to find his way in life, not only in the
inner world but also in the outer world of na-
ture. They help him to foretell the weather and
give him invaluable guidance in his hunting,
upon which his life depends. I mention these
very primitive people because they are uncon-
taminated by our civilized ideas and still have
natural insight into the essence of what Jung
calls the Self.

The Self can be defined as an inner guiding
factor that is different from the conscious per-
sonality and that can be grasped only through
the investigation of one’s own dreams. These
show it to be the regulating center that brings
about a constant extension and maturing of the
personality. But this larger, more nearly total
aspect of the psyche appears first as merely an
inborn possibility. It may emerge very slightly,
or it may develop relatively completely during
one’s lifetime. How far it develops depends on
whether or not the ego is willing to listen to
the messages of the Self. Just as the Naskapi
have noticed that a person who is receptive to
the hints of the Great Man gets better and more
helpful dreams, we could add that the inborn
Great Man becomes more real within the
receptive person than in those who neglect him.
Such a person also becomes a more complete
human being.

It even seems as if the ego has not been pro-
duced by nature to follow its own arbitrary
impulses to an unlimited extent, but to help to
make real the totality — the whole psyche. It is
the ego that serves to light up the entire system,
allowing it to become conscious and thus to be
realized. If, for example, I have an artistic
talent of which my ego is not conscious, nothing
will happen to it. The gift may as well be non-
existent. Only if my ego notices it can I bring
it into reality. The inborn but hidden totality
of the psyche is not the same thing as a whole-
ness that is fully realized and lived.

One could picture this in the following way:
The seed of a mountain pine contains the
whole future tree in a latent form ; but each
seed falls at a certain time onto a particular
place, in which there are a number of special

factors, such as the quality of the soil and the
stones, the slope of the land, and its exposure
to sun and wind. The latent totality of the pine
in the seed reacts to these circumstances by
avoiding the stones and inclining toward the
sun, with the result that the tree’s growth is
shaped. Thus an individual pine slowly comes
into existence, constituting the fulfillment of its
totality, its emergence into the realm of reality.
Without the living tree, the image of the pine is
only a possibility or an abstract idea. Again, the
realization of this uniqueness in the individual
man is the goal of the process of individuation.

From one point of view this process takes
place in man (as well as in every other living
being) by itself and in the unconscious; it is a
process by which man lives out his innate hu-
man nature. Strictly speaking, however, the
process of individuation is real only if the indi-
vidual is aware of it and consequently makes a
living connection with it. We do not know
whether the pine tree is aware of its own
growth, whether it enjoys and suffers the dif-
ferent vicissitudes that shape it. But man cer-
tainly is able to participate consciously in his
development. He even feels that from time to
time, by making free decisions, he can co-
operate actively with it. This co-operation
belongs to the process of individuation in the
narrower sense of the word.

Man, however, experiences something that
is not contained in our metaphor of the pine
tree. The individuation process is more than a
coming to terms between the inborn germ of
wholeness and the outer acts of fate. Its subjec-
tive experience conveys the feeling that some
supra-personal force is actively interfering in a
creative way. One sometimes feels that the un-
conscious is leading the way in accordance with
a secret design. It is as if something is looking
at me, something that I do not see but that sees
me — perhaps that Great Man in the heart, who
tells me his opinions about me by means of
dreams.

But this creatively active aspect of the psy-
chic nucleus can come into play only when the
ego gets rid of all purposive and wishful aims
and tries to get to a deeper, more basic form

162

of existence. The ego must be able to listen
attentively and to give itself, without any fur-
ther design or purpose, to that inner urge to-
ward growth. Many existentialist philosophers
try to describe this state, but they go only as
far as stripping off the illusions of conscious-
ness: They go right up to the door of the un-
conscious and then fail to open it.

People living in cultures more securely rooted
than our own have less trouble in understand-
ing that it is necessary to give up the utilitarian
attitude of conscious planning in order to make
way for the inner growth of the personality. I
once met an elderly lady who had not achieved
much in her life, in terms of outward achieve-
ment. But she had in fact made a good mar-
riage with a difficult husband, and had some-
how developed into a mature personality. When
she complained to me that she had not “done"
anything in her life, I told her a story related
by a Chinese sage, Chuang-Tzu. She under-
stood immediately and felt great relief. This is
the story :

A wandering carpenter, called Stone, saw on his
travels a gigantic old oak tree standing in a field
near an earth-altar. The carpenter said to his
apprentice, who was admiring the oak: “This is

An earth altar beneath a tree (in
a 19th-century Chinese painting).

Such round or square structures
usually symbolize the Self, to which
the ego must submit to fulfill the
process of individuation

a useless tree. If you wanted to make a ship, it
would soon rot; if you wanted to make tools, they
would break. You can't do anything useful with
this tree, and that's why it has become so old.''

But in an inn, that same evening, when the car-
penter went to sleep, the old oak tree appeared
to him in his dream and said: “Why do you com-
pare me to your cultivated trees such as white-
thorn, pear, orange, and apple trees, and all the
others that hear fruit? Even before they can ripen
their fruit, people attack and violate them. Their
branches are broken, their twigs are torn. Their
own gifts bring harm to them, and they cannot
live out their natural span. That is what happens
everywhere, and that is why I have long since
tried to become completely useless. You poor mor-
tal! Imagine if I had been useful in any way,
would I have reached this size? Furthermore,
you and I are both creatures, and how can one
creature set himself so high as to judge another
creature? You useless mortal man, what do you
know r about useless trees?"

The carpenter woke up and meditated upon his
dream, and later, when his apprentice asked him
why just this one tree served to protect the earth-
altar, he answered, “Keep your mouth shut! Let's
hear no more about it! The tree grew here on
purpose because anywhere else people would have
ill-treated it. If it were not the tree of the earth-
altar. it might have been chopped down."

The carpenter obviously understood his
dream. He saw that simply to fulfill one’s des-
tiny is the greatest human achievement, and
that our utilitarian notions have to give way in
the face of the demands of our unconscious

t

psyche: If we translate this metaphor into psy-
chological language, the tree symbolizes the
process of individuation, giving a lesson to our
shortsighted ego.

Under the tree that fulfilled its destiny, there
was — in Chuang-Tzu’s story--an earth-altar.
This was a crude, unwrought stone upon which
people made sacrifices to the local god who
“owned" this piece ofland. The symbol of the
earth-altar points to the fact that in order to
bring the individuation process into reality, one
must surrender consciously to the power of the
unconscious, instead of thinking in terms of
what one should do, or of what is generally
thought right, or of what usually happens. One
must simply listen, in order to learn what the

163

inner totality the Self wants one to do here
and now in a particular situation.

Our attitude must be like that ol the moun-
tain pine mentioned above: It does not get
annoyed when its growth is obstructed by a
stone, nor does it make plans about how to
overcome the obstacles. It merely tries to feel
whether it should grow more toward the left or
the right, toward the slope or away from it.
Like the tree, we should give in to this almost
imperceptible, yet powerfully dominating, im-
pulse an impulse that comes from the urge to-
ward unique, creative self-realization. And this
is a process in which one must repeatedly seek
out and find something that is not yet known
to anyone. The guiding hints or impulses come,
not from the ego, but from the totality of the
psyche: the Self.

It is, moreover, useless to east furtive glances
at the way someone else is developing, because
each of us has a unique task of self-realization.
Although many human problems are similar,
they are never identical. All pine trees are very
much alike (otherwise we should not recognize
them as pines), yet none is exactly the same as
another. Because of these factors of sameness
and difference, it is difficult to summarize the
infinite variations of the process of individua-

tion. The fact is that each person has to do
something different, something that is uniquely
his own.

Many people have criticized the Jungian
approach for not presenting psychic material
systematically. But these critics forget that the
material itself is a living experience charged
with emotion, by nature irrational and ever-
changing, which does not lend itself to systema-
tization except in the most superficial fashion.
Modern depth psychology has here reached the
same limits that confront microphysics. That is,
when we are dealing with statistical averages,
a rational and systematic description of the facts
is possible. But when we are attempting to de-
scribe a single psychic event, we can do no more
than present an honest picture of it from as
many angles as possible. I n the same way, scien-
tists have to admit that they do not know what
light is. T hey can say only that in certain ex-
perimental conditions it seems to consist of par-
ticles, while in other experimental conditions it
seems to consist of waves. But what it is kt in
itself '' is not known. The psychology of the un-
conscious and any description of the process of
individuation encounter comparable difficulties
of definition. But 1 will try here to give a sketch
of some of their most typical features.

The first approach of the unconscious

I or most people the years of youth are char-
acterized by a state of gradual awakening in
which the individual slowly becomes aware of
the world and of himself Childhood is a period
of great emotional intensity, and a child's
earliest dreams often manifest in symbolic form
the basic structure of the psyche, indicating how
it will later shape the destiny of the individual
concerned. For exam pie, Jung once told a group
of students about a young woman who was so
haunted by anxiety that she committed suicide
at the age of 26. As a small child, she had
(beamed that “Jack Frost'' had entered her
room while she was lyirlg in bed and pinched
her on the stomach. She woke and discovered
that she had pinched herself with her own hand.
The dream did not (lighten her; she merely re-
membered that she had bad such a dream. But
the fact that she did not react emotionally to
her strange encounter with the demon of the
cold of congealed life did not augur well for
the future and was itself abnormal. It was with
a cold, unfeeling hand that she later put an end

to her life. From this single dream it is possible
to deduce the tragic fate of the dreamer, which
was anticipated by her psyche in childhood.

Sometimes it is not a dream but some very
impressive and unforgettable real event that,
like a prophecy, anticipates the future in sym-
bolic form. It is well known that children often
forget events that seem impressive to adults but
keep a vivid recollection of some incident or
story that no one else has noticed. When we
look into one of these childhood memories, we
usually find that it depicts (if interpreted as if
it were a symbol) a basic problem ol the child's
psychic makeup.

When a child reaches school age, the phase
of building up the ego and of adapting to the
outer world begins. This phase generally brings
a number of painful shocks. At the same time,
some children begin to feel very different from
others, and this feeling of being unique brings
a certain sadness that is part of the loneliness
of many youngsters. T he imperfections of the
world, and the evil within oneself as well as out-

A child, adapting to the outside
world, receives many psychological
shocks: far left, the fearful first
day at school; center, the surprise
and pain resulting from an attack
by another child; left, the grief
and bewilderment of the first
experience of death As in effect
a protection from such shocks, the
child may dream or draw a circular,
quadrangular, nuclear motif (above)
that symbolizes the all important
center of the psyche.

I( >f)

side, become conscious problems; the child must
try to cope with urgent (but not yet understood)
inner impulses as well as the demands of the
outer world.

If the development of consciousness is dis-
turbed in its normal unfolding, children fre-
quently retire from outer or inner difficulties
into an inner “fortress"; and when that hap-
pens, their dreams and symbolic drawings of
unconscious material often reveal to an unusual
degree a type of circular, quadrangular, and
“nuclear" motif (which I will explain later).
This refers to the previously mentioned psychic
nucleus, the vital center of the personality from
which the whole structural development of con-
sciousness stems. It is natural that the image of
the center should appear in an especially strik-
ing way when the psychic life of the individual
is threatened. From this central nucleus (as far
as we know today), the whole building up of ego
consciousness is directed, the ego apparently be-
ing a duplicate or structural counterpart of the
original center.

In this early phase there are many children
who earnestly seek for some meaning in life that
could help them to deal with the chaos both
within and outside themselves. There are others,
however, who are still unconsciouslv carried

along by the dynamism of inherited and instinc-
tive archetypal patterns. These young people are
not concerned about the deeper meaning of life,
because their experiences with love, nature,
sport, and work contain an immediate and
satisfying meaning for them. They are not neces-
sarily more superficial; usually they are carried
by the stream of life with less friction and dis-
turbance than their more introspective fellows.
If I travel in a car or train without looking out,
it is only the stops, starts, and sudden turns that
make me realise I am moving at all.

The actual process ofindividuation— thecon-
scious coming- to- terms with one's own inner
center (psychic nucleus) or Sell — generally be-
gins with a wounding of the personality and the
suffering that accompanies it. This initial shock
amounts to a sort of “call," although it is not
often recognized as such. On the contrary, the
ego feels hampered in its will or its desire and
usually projects the obstruction onto something
external. That is, the ego accuses God or the
economic situation or the boss or the marriage
partner of being responsible for whatever is
obstructing it.

Or perhaps everything seems outwardly all
right, but beneath the surface a person is suffer-
ing from a deadly boredom that makes everv-

166

thing seem meaningless and empty. Many
myths and fairy tales symbolically describe this
initial stage in the process of individuation by
telling of a king who has fallen ill or grown old.
Other familiar story patterns are that a royal
couple is barren ; or that a monster steals all the
women, children, horses, and wealth of the king-
dom; or that a demon keeps the king’s army
or his ship from proceeding on its course; or
that darkness hangs over the lands, wells dry
up, and flood, drought, and frost afflict the
country. Thus it seems as if the initial encounter
with the Self casts a dark shadow ahead of
time, or as if the “inner friend” comes at first
like a trapper to catch the helplessly struggling
ego in his snare.

In myths one finds that the magic or talisman
that can cure the misfortune of the king or his
country always proves to be something very
special. In one tale “a white blackbird'' or "a
fish that carries a golden ring in its gills” is
needed to restore the king’s health. In another,
the king wants “the water of life" or “three
golden hairs from the head of the devil" or “a
woman's golden plait" (and afterward, natur-
ally, the owner of the plait). Whatever it is, the
thing that can drive away the evil is always
unique and hard to find.

It is exactly the same in the initial crisis in
the life of an individual. One is seeking some-
thing that is impossible to find or about which
nothing is known. In such moments all well-
meant, sensible advice is completely useless —
advice that urges one to try to be responsible,
to take a holiday, not to work so hard (or to
work harder), to have more (or less) human con-
tact, or to take up a hobby. None of that helps,
or at best only rarely. There is only one thing
that seems to work; and that is to turn directly
toward the approaching darkness without pre-
judice and totally naively, and to try to find
out what its secret aim is and what it wants
from you.

The hidden purpose of the oncoming dark-
ness is generally something so unusual, so unique
and unexpected, that as a rule one can find out
what it is only by means of dreams and fanta-
sies welling up from the unconscious. If one
focuses attention on the unconscious without
rash assumptions or emotional rejection, it often
breaks through in a flow of helpful symbolic
images. But not always. Sometimes it first offers
a series of painful realizations of what is wrong
with oneselfand one’s conscious attitudes. Then
one must begin the process by swallowing all
sorts of bitter truths.

Far left, a woodcut from a 1 7th-
century alchemical manuscript
depictsa king who has fallen ill —
a common symbolic image of the
emptiness and boredom { in the
consciousness) that can mark the
initial stage of the individuation
process, Left, from the 1 960 Italian
film La Dolce Vita, another image
of this psychological state: Guests
explore the run -down interior of
a decayed aristocrat s castle

Right, a painting by the modern
Swiss artist Paul Klee entitled
Fairy Tale. It illustrates a tale
of a young man who sought and
found the "bluebird of happiness."
and so could marry a princess.

In many fairy tales such a talisman
is necessary to cure illness or
misfortune, symbols of our
feelings of emptiness and futility

i

The realization of the shadow

Whether tlu* unconscious conics up at first in
a helpful or a negative form, after a time the
need usually arises to readapt the conscious
attitude in a better way to the unconscious fac-
tors therefore to accept what seems to be
“criticism" from the unconscious. Through
dreams one becomes acquainted with aspects of
one s own personality that for various reasons
one has preferred not to look at too closely.
This is what Jung called "the realization of the
shadow." (He used the term “shadow” for this
unconscious part of* the personality because it
actually often appears in dreams in a personi-
fied form.)

The shadow is not the whole of the uncon-
scious personality. It represents unknown or
little-known attributes and qualities of the ego

aspects that mostly belong to the personal
sphere and that could just as well be conscious.
In some aspects, the shadow can also consist of
collective factors that stem from a source out-
side the individual’s personal life.

When an individual makes an attempt to see
his shadow, he becomes aware of (and often
ashamed of) those qualities and impulses he
denies in himself but can plainly see in other

people— such things as egotism, mental laziness,
and sloppiness; unreal fantasies, schemes, and
plots; carelessness and cowardice; inordinate
love of money and possessions in short, all the
little sins about which he might previously have
told himself: “That doesn't matter; nobody
will notice it, and in any case other people
do it too."

If you feel an overwhelming rage coming up
in you when a friend reproaches you about a
fault, you can be fairly sure that at this point
you will find a part of your shadow, of which
you are unconscious. It is, of course, natural to
become annoyed when others who are "no bet-
ter" criticize you because of shadow faults. But
what can you say if your own dreams — an inner
judge in your own being reproach you? T hat
is the moment when the ego gets caught, and
the result is usually embarrassed silence. After-
ward the painf ul and lengthy work of self-edu-
cation begins a work, we might say, that is
the psychological equivalent of the labors of
Hercules. I bis unfortunate hero's first task, you
will remember, was to clean up in one day the
Augean Stables, in which hundreds of cattle had
dropped their dung for many decades — a task

Three examples of a ‘collective
infection" that can weld people
mto an irrational mob and to
which the shadow (the dark side of
the ego-personality) is vulnerable
Left, a scene from a 1 961 Polish
film concerning 1 7th -century
French nuns who were “possessed
by the devil " Right a drawing
by Brueghel depicts the affliction
(largely psychosomatic) called "St
Vitus’ Dance," which was widespread
in the Middle Ages Far right, the
fiery -cross emblem of the Ku Klux
Klan. the white supremacy "secret
society" of America’s South whose
racial intolerance has often led
to acts of mob violence

so enormous that the ordinary mortal would be
overcome by discouragement at the mere
thought of it.

The shadow does not consist only of omis-
sions. It shows up just as often in an impulsive
or inadvertent act. Before one has time to think,

the dreamer. The following dream may serve
as an example. The dreamer was a man of 48
who tried to live very much for and by him-
self, working hard and disciplining himself, re-
pressing pleasure and spontaneity to a far
greater extent than suited his real nature.

the evil remark pops out, the plot is hatched,
the wrong decision is made, and one is con-
fronted with results that were never intended
or consciously wanted. Furthermore, the sha-
dow is exposed to collective infections to a much
greater extent than is the conscious personality.
When a man is alone, for instance, he feels rela-
tively all right; but as soon as "the others" do
dark, primitive things, he begins to fear that if
he doesn't join in, he will be considered a fool.
Thus he gives way to impulses that do not really
belong to him at all. It is particularly in con-
tacts with people of the same sex that one
stumbles over both one's own shadow and those
of other people. Although we do see the shadow
in a person of the opposite sex, we are usually
much less annoyed by it and can more easily
pardon it.

In dreams and myths, therefore, the shadow
appears as a person of the same sex as that of

I owned and inhabited a very big house in
town, and I didn't yet know all its different parts.
So I took a walk through it and discovered,
mainly in the cellar, several rooms about which
I knew nothing and even exits leading into other
cellars or into subterranean streets. I felt uneasy
when I found that several of these exits were not
locked and some had no locks at all. Moreover,
there were some laborers at work in the neighbor-
hood who could have sneaked in. . . .

When I came up again to the ground floor, I
passed a hack yard where again I discovered dif-
ferent exits into the street or into other houses.
When I tried to investigate them more closely, a
man came up to me laughing loudly and calling
out that we were old pals from the elementary
school. I remembered him too, and while he was
telling me about his life, I walked along with him
toward the exit and strolled with hiiii through the
streets.

There was a strange chiaroscuro in the air as
we walked through an enormous circular street

Collection. The Museum of Modern Art. New York

and arrived at a green lawn where three gallop-
ing horses suddenly passed us. They were beauti-
ful, strong animals, wild but well-groomed, and
they had no rider with them. (Had they run away
from military service?)

The maze of strange passages, chambers, and
unlocked exits in the cellar recalls the old
Egyptian representation of the underworld,
which is a well-known symbol of the uncon-
scious wdth its unknown possibilities. It also
shows how one is “open” to other influences in
one's unconscious shadow side, and how un-
canny and alien elements can break in. The
cellar, one can say, is the basement of the
dreamer's psyche. In the back yard of the
strange building (which represents the still un-
perceived psychic scope of the dreamer's person-
ality) an old school friend suddenly turns up.
This person obviously personifies another aspect
of the dreamer himself— an aspect that had
been part of his life as a child but that he had
forgotten and lost. It often happens that a per-
son's childhood qualities (for instance, gaiety,
irascibility, or perhaps trustfulness) suddenly

disappear, and one does not know wTere or how :
they have gone. It is such a lost characteristic
of the dreamer that now returns (from the back
yard) and tries to make friends again. This
figure probably stands for the dreamer’s
neglected capacity for enjoying life and for his
extraverted shadow side.

But we soon learn why the dreamer feels ‘Tin-
easy” just before meeting this seemingly harm-
less old friend. When he strolls with him in the
street, the horses break loose. The dreamer
thinks they may have escaped from military
service (that is to say, from the conscious disci-
pline that has hitherto characterized his life).
The fact that the horses have no rider shows
that instinctive drives can get away from con-
scious control. In this old friend, and in the
horses, all the positive force reappears that was
lacking before and that was badly needed by
the dreamer.

This is a problem that often comes up when
one meets one’s “other side.” The shadow usu-
ally contains values that are needed by consci-
ousness, but that exist in a form that makes it

170

Left, Anxious Journey by the modern
Italian artist de Chirico The title
and gloomy passages of the painting
express the nature of the first
contact with the unconscious when
the individuation process begins.

The unconscious is often symbolized
by corridors, labyrinths, or mazes:
Right, on a papyrus (c. 1400 b.c.),
the seven doors of the Egyptian
underworld, itself seen as a maze
Below, drawings of three mazes:
left to right, a Finnish stone maze
(Bronze Age); a 1 9th-century British
turf maze; and a maze (in tiles) on
the floor of Chartres Cathedral
(it could be walked as a symbolic
pilgrimage to the Holy Land).

difficult to integrate them into one's life. The
passages and the large house in this dream also
show that the dreamer does not yet know his
own psychic dimensions and is not yet able to
fill them out.

The shadow in this dream is typical for an
introvert (a man who tends to retire too much
from outer life). In the case of an extravert, who
is turned more toward outer objects and outer
life, the shadow would look quite different.

A young man who had a very lively tempera-
ment embarked again and again on successful
enterprises, while at the same time his dreams
insisted that he should finish off a piece of pri-
vate creative work he had begun. The follow-
ing was one of those dreams :

A man is lying on a couch and has pulled the
cover over his face. He is a Frenchman, a des-
perado who would take on any criminal job. An
official is accompanying me downstairs, and I
know that a plot has been made against me:
namely, that the Frenchman should kill me as if
by chance. (That is how it would look from the
outside.) He actually sneaks up behind me when

we approach the exit, but I am on my guard. A
tall, portly man (rather rich and influential) sud-
denly leans against the wall beside me, feeling ill.
I quickly grab the opportunity to kill the official
by stabbing his heart. “One only notices a bit of'
moisture*' this is said like a comment. Now I
am safe, for the Frenchman won't attack me since
the man who gave him his orders is dead. (Prob-
ably the official and the successful portly man
are the same person, the latter somehow replacing
the former.;

The desperado represents the other side of
the dreamer— his introversion — which has
reached a completely destitute state. He lies on
a couch (i.e. he is passive) and pulls the cover
over his face because he wants to be left alone.
The official, on the other hand, and the prosper-
ous portly man (who are secretly the same per-
son) personify the dreamer's successful outer re-
sponsibilities and activities. The sudden illness
of the portly man is connected with the fact that
this dreamer had in fact become ill several times
when he had allowed his dynamic energy to ex-
plode too forcibly in his external life. But this

i 7 1

successful man has no blood in his veins only
a sort of moisture which means that these ex-
ternal ambitious activities of the dreamer con-
tain no genuine life and no passion, but are
bloodless mechanisms, t hus it would be no real
loss if the portly man were killed. At the end of
the dream, the Frenchman is satisfied ; he obvi-
ously represents a positive shadow figure who
had turned negative and dangerous only be-
cause the conscious attitude of the dreamer did
not agree with him.

This dream shows us that the shadow can
consist of many different elements for in-
stance, of unconscious ambition (the successful
portly man) and of introversion (the French-
man). This particular dreamer's association to
the French, moreover, was that they know how
to handle love affairs very well. Therefore the
two shadow figures also represent two well-
known drives: power and sex. T he power drive
appears momentarily in a double form, both as
an official and as a successful man. The official,
or civil servant, personifies collective adapta-
tion, whereas the successful man denotes ambi-
tion; but naturally both serve the power drive.
When the dreamer succeeds in stopping this
dangerous inner force, the Frenchman is sud-
denly no longer hostile. In other words, the
equally dangerous aspect of the sex drive has
also surrendered.

Obviously, the problem of the shadow plays
a great role in all political conflicts. If the man
who had this dream had not been sensible about
his shadow problem, he could easily have iden-
tified the desperate Frenchman with the “dan-
gerous Communists" of outer life, or the official
plus the prosperous man with the “grasping
capitalists/' In this way he would have avoided
seeing that he had within him such warring
elements. If people observe their own uncon-
scious tendencies in other people, this is called
a “projection." Political agitation in all coun-
tries is full of such projections, just as much as
the back-yard gossip of little groups and indi-
viduals. Projections of all kinds obscure our
view of our fellow men, spoiling its objectivity,
and thus spoiling all possibility of genuine
human relationships.

i

"For over five years this man
has been chasing around Europe
like a madman in search of
something he could set on fire.
Unfortunately he again and
again finds hirelings who
open the gates of their country
to this international incendiary "

1 7 2

And there is an additional disadvantage in
projecting our shadow. If we identify our own
shadow with, say, the Communists or the capi-
talists, a part of our own personality remains
on the opposing side. The result is that we shall
constantly (though involuntarily) do things be-
hind our own backs that support this other side,
and thus we shall unwittingly help our enemy.
If, on the contrary, we realize the projection and
can discuss matters without fear or hostility,
dealing with the other person sensibly, then
there is a chance of mutual understanding —or
at least of a truce.

Whether the shadow becomes our friend or
enemy depends largely upon ourselves. As the
dreams of the unexplored house and the French
desperado both show, the shadow is not neces-
sarily always an opponent. In fact, he is exactly
like any human being with whom one has to get
along, sometimes by giving in, sometimes by re-
sisting, sometimes by giving love -whatever the
situation requires. The shadow becomes hostile
only when he is ignored or misunderstood.

Sometimes, though not often, an individual
feels impelled to live out the worse side of his
nature and to repress his better side. In such
cases the shadow appears as a positive figure in
his dreams. But to a person who lives out his
natural emotions and feelings, the shadow may
appear as a cold and negative intellectual; it
then personifies poisonousjudgments and nega-
tive thoughts that have been held back. So,
whatever form it takes, the function of the
shadow is to represent the opposite side of the
ego and to embody just those qualities that one
dislikes most in other people.

It would be relatively easy if one could inte-
grate the shadow into the conscious personality
just by attempting to be honest and to use one’s
insight. But, unfortunately, such an attempt
does not always work. There is such a passionate
drive within the shadowy part of oneself that
reason may not prevail against it. A bitter ex-
perience coming from the outside may occa-
sionally help; a brick, so to speak, has to drop
on one’s head to put a stop to shadow drives
and impulses. At times a heroic decision may
serve to halt them, but such a superhuman
effort is usually possible only if the Great Man
within (the Self ) helps the individual to carry
it through.

The fact that the shadow contains the over-
whelming power of irresistible impulse does not
mean, however, that the drive should always be
heroically repressed. Sometimes the shadow is
powerful because the urge of the Self is point-
ing in the same direction, and so one does not
know whether it is the Self or the shadow that
is behind the inner pressure. In the unconscious,
one is unfortunately in the same situation as in
a moonlit landscape: All the contents are
blurred and merge into one another, and one
never knows exactly what or where anything
is, or where one thing begins and ends. (This is
known as the “contamination” of unconscious
contents.)

When Jung called one aspect of the uncon-
scious personality the shadow, he was referring
to a relatively well-defined factor. But some-
times everything that is unknown to the ego is
mixed up with the shadow, including even the
most valuable and highest forces. Who, for in-

Rather than face our defects as
revealed by the shadow, we project
them on to others for instance,
on to our political enemies Above
left, a poster made for a parade
in Communist China shows America
as an evil serpent (bearing Nazi
swastikas) killed by a Chinese hand
Left, Hitler during a speech; the
quotation is his description of
Churchill Projections also flourish
in malicious gossip (right, from
the British television series
Coronation Street)

Above, the wild white stallion from
the 1 953 French film Crin Blanc.

Wild horses often symbolize the
uncontrollable instinctive drives
that can erupt from the unconscious
and that many people try to repress.
In the film, the horse and a boy
form a strong attachment (though
the horse still runs wild with his
herd). But local horsemen set out
to capture the wild horses. The
stallion and his boy rider are
pursued for miles; finally they
are cornered on the seashore.

Rather than submit to capture, the
boy and the horse plunge into the
sea to be swept away Symbolically,
the story's end seems to represent
an escape into the unconscious
(the sea) as a way to avoid facing
reality in the outside world.

stance, could be quite sure whether the French
desperado in the dream I quoted was a useless
tramp or a most valuable introvert? And the
bolting horses of the preceding dream — should
they be allowed to run free or not? In a case
when the dream itself does not make things
clear, the conscious personality will have to
make the decision.

If the shadow figure contains valuable, vital
forces, they ought to be assimilated into actual
experience and not repressed. It is up to the ego
to give up its pride and priggishness and to live
out something that seems to be dark, but actu-
ally may not be. This can require a sacrifice
just as heroic as the conquest of passion, but
in an opposite sense.

The ethical difficulties that arise when one
meets one’s shadow are well described in the
18 th Book of the Koran. In this tale Moses
meets Khidr (“the Green One” or “first angel
of God”) in the desert. They wander along to-
gether, and Khidr expresses his fear that Moses
will not be able to witness his deeds without
indignation. If Moses cannot bear with him and
trust him, Khidr will have to leave.

Presently Khidr scuttles the fishing boat of
some poor villagers. Then, before Moses’s eyes,
he kills a handsome young man, and finally he
restores the fallen wall of a city of unbelievers.
Moses cannot help expressing his indignation,
and so Khidr has to leave him. Before his de-
parture, however, he explains the reasons for
his actions: By scuttling the boat he actu-

ally saved it for its owners because pirates
were on their way to steal it. As it is, the fisher-
men can salvage it. The handsome young man
was on his way to commit a crime, and by kill-
ing him Khidr saved his pious parents from
infamy. By restoring the wall, two pious young
men were saved from ruin because their trea-
sure was buried under it. Moses, who had been
so morally indignant, saw now (too late) that
his judgment had been too hasty. Khidr's doings
had seemed to be totally evil, but in fact they
were not.

Looking at this story naively, one might
assume that Khidr is the lawless, capricious,
evil shadow of pious, law-abiding Moses. But
this is not the case. Khidr is much more the per-
sonification of some secret creative actions of
the Godhead. (One can find a similar meaning
in the famous Indian story of “The King and
the Corpse” as interpreted by Henry Zimmer.)
It is no accident that I have not quoted a dream
to illustrate this subtle problem. I have chosen
this well-known story from the Koran because
it sums up the experience of a lifetime, which
would very rarely be expressed with such clarity
in an individual dream.

When dark figures turn up in our dreams and
seem to want something, we cannot be sure
whether they personify merely a shadowy part of
ourselves, or the Self, or both at the same time.
Divining in advance whether our dark partner
symbolizes a shortcoming that we should
overcome or a meaningful bit of life that we

The shadow can be said to have two
aspects, one dangerous, the other
valuable The painting of the Hindu
god Vishnu, far left, images such
a duality: Usually considered a
benevolent god, Vishnu here appears
in a demonic aspect, tearing a man
apart. Left, from a Japanese
temple (a.d. 759), a sculpture of
Buddha also expresses duality:

The god's many arms hold symbols
of both good and evil. Right, the
doubt-stricken Martin Luther
(portrayed by Albert Finney in the
1961 play Luther by Britain's John
Osborne) : Luther was never sure
whether his break from the Church
was inspired by God or arose from
his own pride and obstinacy (in
symbolic terms, the "evil" side
of his shadow).

should accept this is one of the most difficult
problems that we encounter on the way to indi-
viduation. Moreover, the dream symbols are
often so subtle and complicated that one can-
not be sure of their interpretation. In such a
situation all one can do is accept the discom-
fort of ethical doubt making no final decisions
or commitments and continuing to watch the
dreams. This resembles the situation of Cinder-
ella when her stepmother threw a heap of good
and bad peas in front of her and asked her to
sort them out. Although it seemed quite hope-
less, Cinderella began patiently to sort the peas,
and suddenly doves (or ants, in some versions)
came to help her. These creatures symbolize
helpful, deeply unconscious impulses that can
only be felt in one’s body, as it were, and that
point to a way out.

Somewhere, right at the bottom of one's own
being, one generally does know where one
should go and what one should do. But there
are times when the clown we call '‘I” behaves
in such a distracting fashion that the inner voice
cannot make its presence felt.

Sometimes all attempts to understand the
hints of the unconscious fail, and in such a
difficulty one can only have the courage to do
what seems to be right, while being ready to
change course if the suggestions of the uncon-
scious should suddenly point in another direc-
tion. It may also happen (although this is
unusual) that a person will find it better to
resist the urge of the unconscious, even at the
price of feeling warped by doing so, rather than
depart too far from the state of being human.
(This would be the situation of people who
had to live out a criminal disposition in order
to be completely themselves.)

The strength and inner clarity needed by the
ego in order to make such a decision stem
secretly from the Great Man, who appar-
ently does not want to reveal himself too clearly.
It may be that the Self wants the ego to make
a free choice, or it may be that the Self depends
on human consciousness and its decisions to
help him to become manifest. When it comes
to such difficult ethical problems, no one can
truly judge the deeds of others. Each man has

to look to his own problem and try to determine
what is right for himself. As an old Zen Budd-
hist Master said, we must follow the example
of the cowherd who watches his ox “with a
stick so that it will not graze on other people’s
meadows."

These new discoveries of depth psychology
are bound to make some change in our collective
ethical views, for they will compel us to judge
all human actions in a much more individual
and subtle way. The discovery of the uncon-
scious is one of the most far-reaching discov-
eries of recent times. But the fact that
recognition of its unconscious reality involves
honest self-examination and reorganization ol
one’s life causes many people to continue to
behave as if nothing at all has happened. It
takes a lot of courage to take the unconscious
seriously and to tackle the problems it raises.
Most people are too indolent to think deeply
about even those moral aspects of their beha-
vior of which they are conscious; they are cer-
tainly too lazy to consider how the unconscious
affects them.

176

The anima: the woman within

Difficult and subtle ethical problems are not in-
variably brought up by the appearance of the
shadow itself. Often another "inner figure”
emerges. If the dreamer is a man, he will dis-
cover a female personification of his uncon-
scious; and it will be a male figure in the case
of a woman. Often this second symbolic figure
turns up behind the shadow, bringing up new
and different problems. Jung called its male
and female forms "animus” and "anima.”

The anima is a personification of all feminine
psychological tendencies in a man's psyche, such
as vague feelings and moods, prophetic hunches,
receptiveness to the irrational, capacity for per-
sonal love, feeling for nature, and — last but not
least — his relation to the unconscious. It is no
mere chance that in olden times priestesses (like
the Greek Sibyl) were used to fathom the divine
will and to make connection with the gods.

A particularly good example of how the
anima is experienced as an inner figure in a
man's psyche is found in the medicine men and
prophets (shamans) among the Eskimo and
other arctic tribes. Some of these even wear
women's clothes, or have breasts depicted on
their garments, in order to manifest their inner
feminine side the side that enables them to
connect with the “ghost land'' (i.e. what we
call the unconscious).

One reported case tells of a young man who
was being initiated by an older shaman and
who was buried by him in a snow hole. He fell
into a state of dreaminess and exhaustion. In
this coma he suddenly saw a woman who
emitted light. She instructed him in all he
needed to know and later, as his protective
spirit, helped him to practice his difficult pro-
fession by relating him to the powers of the be-

The anima (the female element in
a male psyche) is often personified
as a witch or a priestess — women
who have links with "forces of
darkness" and "the spirit world"

(i.e. the unconscious). Left, a
sorceress with imps and demons
(in a 1 7th-century engraving).
Below, a shaman of a Siberian tribe,
who is a man dressed as a woman —
because women are thought to be
more able to contact spirits.

Above, a woman spiritualist or
medium (from the 1 951 film The
Medium , based on an opera by Gian
Carlo Menotti). The majority of
modern mediums are probably
women; the belief is still widespread
that women are more receptive than
men to the irrational

>77

yond. Such an experience shows the anima as
the personification of a man's unconscious.

In its individual manifestation the character
of a man's anima is as a rule shaped by his
mother. If he feels that his mother had a nega-
tive influence on him, his anima will often ex-
press itself in irritable, depressed moods,
uncertainty, insecurity, and touchiness, flf,
however, he is able to overcome the negative
assaults on himself, they can even serve to re-
inforce his masculinity. ) Within the soul ofsuch
a man the negative mother-anima figure will
endlessly repeat this theme: “I am nothing.
Nothing makes any sense. With others it's differ-
ent, but for me ... I enjoy nothing." These
“anima moods" cause a sort of dullness, a fear
of disease, of impotence, or of accidents. The
whole of life takes on a sad and oppressive
aspect. Such dark moods can even lure a man
to suicide, in which case the anima becomes a
death demon. She appears in this role in
Cocteau's film Orphee .

The French call such an anima figure a
femme fatale . (A milder version of this dark

anima is personified by the Queen of the Night
in Mozart's Magic Flute.) The Greek Sirens or
the German Lorelei also personify this dan-
gerous aspect of the anima, which in this form
symbolizes destructive illusion. The following
Siberian tale illustrates the behavior of such a
destructive anima :

One dav a lonely hunter secs a beautiful
woman emerging from the deep forest on the
other side of the river. She waves at him and
sings:

Oh. come, lonely hunter in the stillness ol dusk.

Come, come! I miss you, I miss you!

Now I will embrace you, embrace you!

Come, come! My nest is near, my nest is near.

( lomc. come, lonely hunter, now in the stillness

of dusk.

He throws olf his clothes and swims across the
river, but suddenly she flies away in the form of
an owl, laughing mockingly at him. When he
tries to swim back to find his clothes, he drowns
in t he cold river.

In this tale the anima symbolizes an unreal
dream of love, happiness, and maternal warmth
(her nest) — a dream that lures men away from

The anima (like the shadow) has
two aspects, benevolent and malefic
(or negative). Left, a scene from
Orphee (a film version by Cocteau
of the Orpheus myth): The woman
can be seen as a lethal anima, for
she has led Orpheus (being carried
by dark "underworld'' figures) to
his doom. Also malevolent are the
Lorelei of Teutonic myth (below,
in a 1 9th-century drawing), water
spirits whose singing lures men
to their death Below right, a
parallel from Slavonic myth: the
Rusalka These beings were thought
to be spirits of drowned girls who
bewitch and drown passing men

'78

reality. The hunter is drowned because he ran
after a wishful fantasy that could not be
fulfilled.

Another way in which the negative anima in
a man s personality can be revealed is in
waspish, poisonous, effeminate remarks by
which he devalues everything. Remarks of this
sort always contain a cheap twisting of the truth
and are in a subtle way destructive. There are
legends throughout the world in which “a
poison damsel'’ (as they call her in the Orient)
appears. She is a beautiful creature who has
weapons hidden in her body or a secret poison
with which she kills her lovers during their first
night together. In this guise the anima is as
cold and reckless as certain uncanny aspects of
nature itself, and in Europe is often expressed
to this day by the belief in witches.

If, on the other hand, a man's experience of
his mother has been positive, this can also affect
his anima in typical but different ways, with
the result that he either becomes effeminate or
is preyed upon by women and thus is unable

this sort can turn men into sentimentalists, or
they may become as touchy as old maids or as
sensitive as the fairy-tale princess who could
feel a pea under 30 mattresses. A still more
subtle manifestation of a negative anima
appears in some fairy tales in the form of a
princess who asks her suitors to answer a series
of riddles or, perhaps, to hide themselves under
her nose. If they cannot give the answers, or if
she can find them, they must die — and she in-
variably wins. The anima in this guise involves
men in a destructive intellectual game. We can
notice the effect of this anima trick in all those
neurotic pseudo-intellectual dialogues that in-
hibit a man from getting into direct touch with
life and its real decisions. He reflects about life
so much that he cannot live it and loses all his
spontaneity and outgoing feeling.

The most frequent manifestation of the
anima takes the form of erotic fantasy. Men
may be driven to nurse their fantasies by look-
ing at films and strip-tease shows, or by day-
dreaming over pornographic material. This is a

to cope with the hardships of life. An anima of crude, primitive aspect of the anima, which

Above, four scenes from the 1 930
German film The Blue Angel, which
concerns a strait-laced professor's
infatuation with a cabaret singer,
clearly a negative anima figure
The girl uses her charm to degrade
the professor, even making him
a buffoon in her cabaret act.

Right, a drawing of Salome with
the head of John the Baptist,
whom she had killed to prove her
power over King Herod

Above, a painting by the 1 5th-century
Italian artist Stefano di Giovanni
depicting St. Anthony confronted by
an attractive young girl But her
bat-like wings reveal that she is
actually a demon, one of the many
temptations offered to St Anthony
—and another embodiment of the
deadly amma figure.

Above right, a British cinema poster
advertising the French film Eve
(1 962). The film is concerned with
the exploits of a femme fatale
(played by the French actress Jeanne
Moreau) —a widely known term for
the "dangerous'' women whose
relationships with men clearly image
the nature of the negative anima.

The following is a description
(taken from the poster above) of
the central character of the film
(a melodramatic description, but one
that might fit many personifications
of the negative anima): "Mysterious
-tantalizing — alluring wanton -
but deep within her burning the
violent fires that destroy a man."

becomes compulsive only when a man does not
sufficiently cultivate his feeling relationships
when his feeling attitude toward life has
remained infantile.

All these aspects of the anima have the same
tendency that we have observed in the shadow :
That is, they can be projected so that they
appear to the man to be the qualities of some
particular woman. It is the presence of the
anima that causes a man to fall suddenly in
love when he sees a woman for the first time
and knows at once that this is “she.” In this
situation, the man feels as if he has known this
woman intimately for all time; he falls for her
so helplessly that it looks to outsiders like com-
plete madness. Women who are of “fairy-like"
character especially attract such anima projec-
tions, because men can attribute almost any-
thing to a creature who is so fascinatingly
vague, and can thus proceed to weave fanta-
sies around her.

The projection of the anima in such a sud-
den and passionate form as a love affair can
greatly disturb a man’s marriage and can lead
to the so-called “human triangle," with its

accompanying difficulties. A bearable solution
to such a drama can be found only if the anima
is recognized as an inner power. The secret aim
of the unconscious in bringing about such an
entanglement is to force a man to develop and
to bring his own being to maturity by integrat-
ing more of his unconscious personality and
bringing it into his real life.

But I have said enough about the negative
side of the anima. There are just as many im-
portant positive aspects. The anima is, for
instance, responsible for the fact that a man is
able to find the right marriage partner. Another
function is at least equally important: When-
ever a man’s logical mind is incapable of dis-
cerning facts that are hidden in his unconscious,
the anima helps him to dig them out. Even
more vital is the role that the anima plays in
putting a man’s mind in tune with the right
inner values and thereby opening the way into
more profound inner depths. It is as if an inner
“radio" becomes tuned to a certain wavelength
that excludes irrelevancies but allows the voice
of the Great Man to be heard. In establishing
this inner “radio" reception, the anima takes

r

A man's stress on intellectualism
can be due to a negative anima —
often represented in legends and
myths by the female figure who
asks riddles that men must answer
or die. Above, a 1 9th-century
French painting depicts Oedipus
answering the Sphinx's riddle

Left, a traditional view of the
demonic anima as an ugly witch —
in a 1 6th -century German woodcut,
"The Bewitched Groom."

The anima appears in crude, childish
form in men's erotic fantasies —
which many men indulge through
forms of pornography. Below, part
of a show in a modern British
strip-tease night club.

In the 1 953 Japanese film Ugetsu
Monogatari, a man comes under the
spell of a ghost princess (center,
above) an image of a projection
of the anima on to a "fairy like'*
woman, producing a destructive
fantasy relationship.

In Madame Bovary the 1 9th century
French novelist Flaubert describes
a "love madness" caused by an anima
projection: "By her constantly
changing moods, sometimes mystical,
sometimes gay, now talkative, now
silent, sometimes passionate,
sometimes superior she knew how
to evoke a thousand desires in him,
a thousand instincts and memories.
She was the beloved one of all
novels, the heroine of all plays,
the "she" of all poems he had ever
read On her shoulders he found
the 'amber glow' of the bathing
Odalisque; she had the long waist
of ladies in the chivalric age;
she also looked like the pale lady
of Barcelona'; but she was always
an angel." Left, Emma Bovary (in
the 1 949 film of the novel) with
her husband (left) and lover.

182

on the role of guide, or mediator, to the world
within and to the Self. That is how she appears
in the example of the initiations of shamans
that 1 described earlier; this is the role of Bea-
trice in Dante’s Paradiso , and also of the god-
dess Isis when she appeared in a dream to
Apuleius, the famous author of The Golden
Ass , in order to initiate him into a higher, more
spiritual form of life.

The dream of a 45-year-old psychotherapist
may help to make clear how the anima can be
an inner guide. As he was going to bed on the
evening before he had this dream, he thought
to himself that it was hard to stand alone in
life, lacking the support of a church. He found
himself envying people who are protected by
the maternal embrace of an organization. (He
had been born a Protestant but no longer had
any religious affiliation.) 'Phis was his dream:

I am in the aisle of an old church filled with
people. Together with my mother and my wife,
I sit at the end of' the aisle in what seem to be
extra seats.

I am to celebrate the Mass as a priest, and I
have a big Mass book in my hands, or, rather, a
prayer book or an anthology of poems. This book
is not familiar to me, and I cannot find the right
text. I am very excited because I have to begin
soon, and, to add to my troubles, my mother and
wife disturb me by chattering about unimportant
trifles. Now the organ stops, and everybody is
waiting for me, so I get up in a determined way
and ask one of the nuns who is kneeling behind
me to hand me her Mass book and point out the
right place which she does in an obliging man-
ner. Now, like a sort of sexton, this same nun pre-
cedes me to the altar, which is somewhere behind
me and to the left, as if we are approaching it
from a side aisle. The Mass book is like a sheet of'
pictures, a sort of board, three feet long and a
foot wide, and on it is the text with ancient pic-
tures in columns, one beside the other.

First the nun has to read a part of tin* liturgy
before I begin, and I have still not found the right
place in the text. She has told me that it is Num-
ber 15, but the numbers are not clear, and I can-
not find it. With determination, however, I turn
toward the congregation, and now I have found
Number 15 (the next to the last on the board),
although I do not yet know' if' I shall be able to
decipher it. I want to try all the same. I wake up.

Men project the anima on to things
as well as women. For instance,
ships are always known as "she”
above, the female figurehead on
the old British clipper ship
Cutty Sark. The captain of a ship
is symbolically "her" husband,
which may be why he must
(according to tradition) go down
with the ship if "she" sinks.

A car is another kind of possession
that is usually feminized — i.e that
can become the focus of many men’s
anima projections. Like ships, cars
are called "she." and their owners
caress and pamper them (below)
like favorite mistresses.

This dream expressed in a symbolic way an
answer from the unconscious to the thoughts
that the dreamer had had the evening before.
It said to him. in effect: “You yourself must
become a priest in your own inner church in
the church of your soul.” Thus the dream
shows that the dreamer does have the helpful
support of an organization; he. is contained in
a church not an external church but one that
exists inside his own soul.

The people (all his own psychic qualities)
want him to function as the priest and celebrate
the Mass himself. Now the dream cannot mean
the actual Mass, for its Mass book is very dif-
ferent from the real one. It seems that the idea
of the M ass is used as a symbol, and therefore
it means a sacrificial act in which the Divinity
is present so that man can communicate with
it. This symbolic solution is, of course, not gen-
erally valid but relates to this particular
dreamer. It is a typical solution for a Protes-
tant. because a man who through real faith is

Two stages in the development of
the anima: First, primitive woman
(above, from a painting by Gauguin);
second, romanticized beauty —as in
the idealized portrait, left, of a
Renaissance Italian girl who is
depicted as Cleopatra. The second
stage was classically embodied in
Helen of Troy {below, with Paris)

184

I"

still contained in the Catholic Church usually
experiences his aninia in the image of the
Church herself, and her sacred images are lor
him the symbols of the unconscious.

Our dreamer did not have this ecclesiastical
experience, and this is why lu* had to follow an
inner way. Furthermore, the dream told him
what he should do. It said: "Your mother-
boundness and your extraversion (represented
by the wife who is an extravert) distract you
and make you feel insecure, and by meaning-
less talk keep you from celebrating the inner
M ass. But if you follow the nun (the introverted
anima j, she will lead you as both a servant and
a priest. She owns a strange Mass book which
is composed of 16 (four times four) ancient pic-
tures. Your Mass consists of your contemplation
of these psychic images that vour religious
anima reveals to you. " In other words, if the
dreamer overcomes his inner uncertainty,
caused by his mother complex, he will find that
his life task has the nature and quality of a
religious service and that if he meditates about
the symbolic meaning of the images in his soul,
they will lead him to this realization.

In this dream the anima appears in her pro-
per positive role that is, as a mediator between
the ego and the Self. The four-times-four con-
figuration of the pictures points to the fact that
the celebration of this inner Mass is performed
in the service of totality. As Jung has demon-
strated, the nucleus of the psyche (the Self)
normally expresses itself in some kind of four-
fold structure. The number lour is also con-
nected with the anima because, as Jung noted,
there are four stages in its development. The
first stage is best symbolized by the figure of
Kve, which represents purely instinctual and
biological relations. Idle second can be seen in
Faust's Helen: She personifies a romantic and
aesthetic level that is. however, still character-
ized by sexual (dements. The third is represen-
ted. for instance, by the Virgin Mary a figure
who raises love (eros > to the heights of spiritual
devotion. The fourth tvpe is symbolized by
Sapientia. wisdom transcending even the most
holy and the most pure. Of this another symbol
is the Shulamile in the Song of Solomon. I n the

Above, the anima’s third stage is
personified as the Virgin Mary (in
a painting by van Eyck). The red of
her robe is the symbolic color of
feeling (or eros ); but in this stage
the eros has become spiritualized.
Below, two examples of the fourth
stage: the Greek goddess of wisdom
Athena (left), and the Mona Lisa.

185

psychic development of modern man this stage
is rarely reached. The Mona Lisa comes nearest
to such a wisdom anima.)

At this stage I am only pointing out that the
Concept of fourfoldness frequently occurs in
certain types of symbolic material. The essen-
tial aspects of this will be discussed later.

But what does the role of the anima as guide
to the inner world mean in practical terms?
This positive function occurs 'when a man takes
seriously the feelings, moods, expectations, and
fantasies sent by his anima and when he fixes
them in some form for example, in writing,
painting, sculpture, musical composition, or
danc ing. When he works at this patiently and
slowly, other more deeply unconscious material
wells up from the depths and connects with the
earlier material. After a fantasy has been fixed
in some specific form, it must be examined both
intellectually and ethically, with an evaluating
feeling reaction. And it is essential to regard it
as being absolutely real ; there must be no lurk-
ing doubt that this is “only a fantasy.* II this
is practiced with devotion over a long period,

the process of individuation gradually becomes
the single reality and can unfold in its true form.

Many examples from literature show the
anima as a guide and mediator to the inner
world: Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerolomachia ,
Rider Haggard’s She, or “the eternal feminine"
in Goethe's Faust. In a medieval mystical text,
an anima figure explains her own nature
as follows:

I am the flower of the field and the lily of the
valleys. I am the mother of lair love and of fear
and of knowledge and of holy hope. ... I am
the mediator of the elements, making one to agree
with another; that which is warm I make cold
and the reverse, and that which is dry I make
moist and the reverse, and that which is hard I
soften. ... 1 am the law in the priest and the
word in the prophet and the counsel in the wise.

I will kill and I will make to live and there is
none that can deliver out of my hand.

In the Middle* Ages there took place* a per-
ceptible spiritual differentiation in religious,
poetical, and other cultural matters; and the
fantasy world of the unconscious was recog-

*/**^^^ \£?

Left, a 1 7th century engraving
dominated by thb symbolic figure
of the anima as mediator between
this world (the monkey, probably
representing man's instinctual
nature) and the next (the hand of
God. reaching from the clouds)

The anima figure seems to parallel
the woman of the Apocalypse, who
also wore a crown of 1 2 stars;
antiquity's moon goddesses; the
Old Testament s Sapientia (the
fourth stage of the anima, p 1 85);
and the Egyptian goddess Isis (who
also had flowing hair, a half-moon
at her womb, and stood with one
foot on land and one on water).

Right, the anima as mediator (or
guide) in a drawing by William
Blake: It illustrates a scene from
the "Purgatorio" of Dante's Divine
Comedy, and shows Beatrice leading
Dante along a symbolically tortuous
mountain path Far right, from
an early film of Rider Haggard's
novel She, a mysterious woman
leads explorers through mountains.

1 8 (i

nized more clearly than before. During this
period, the knightly cult of the lady signified
an attempt to differentiate the feminine side of
man's nature in regard to the outer woman as
well as in relation to the inner world.

The lady to whose service the knight pledged
himself, and for whom he performed his heroic
deeds, was naturally a personification of the
anima. The name of the carrier of the Grail,
in Wolfram von Eschenbacffs version of the
legend, is especially significant: Conduir-amour
("guide in love matters”). She taught the hero
to differentiate both his feelings and his be-
havior toward women. Later, however, this in-
dividual and personal effort of developing the
relationship with the anima was abandoned
when her sublime aspect fused with the figure
of the Virgin, who then became the object of
boundless devotion and praise. When the
anima, as Virgin, was conceived as being all-
positive, her negative aspects found expression
in the belief' in witches.

In China the figure parallel to that of Mary
is the goddess Kwan-Yin. A more popular

A connection between the motif of
four and the anima appears above in
a painting by the Swiss artist Peter
Birkhauser. A four-eyed anima
appears as an overwhelming, terrifying
vision. The four eyes have a symbolic
significance similar to that of the
1 6 pictures in the dream quoted on
p. 183: They allude to the fact that
the anima contains the possibility
of achieving wholeness.

In the painting, right, by the
modern artist Slavko, the
Self is separate from the anima
but still merged with nature. The
painting can be called a "soul
landscape": On the left sits a
dark-skinned, naked woman -the
anima. On the right is a bear, the
animal soul or instinct. Near the
anima is a double tree —
symbolizing the individuation process
in which the inner opposites unite.

In the background one at first sees
a glacier, but on looking closely
one sees that it is also a face.

This face (from which the life-
stream flows) is the Self. It has
four eyes, and looks something like
an animal, because it comes from
instinctive nature. (The painting
thus provides a good example of
the way an unconscious symbol can
inadvertently find its way into
a fantasy landscape.)

Chinese anima-figure is the "Lady of the
Moon/' who bestows the gift of poetry or music
on her favorites and can even give them im-
mortality. In India the same archetype is repre-
sented by Shakti, Parvati, Rati, and many
others; among the Moslems she is chiefly
Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed.

Worship of the anima as an officially recog-
nized religious figure brings the serious disad-
vantage that she loses her individual aspects.
On the other hand, if she is regarded as an
exclusively personal being, there is the danger
that, if she is projected into the outer world, it
is only there that she can be found. This latter
state of affairs can create endless trouble, be-
cause man becomes either the victim of his
erotic fantasies or compulsively dependent on
one actual woman.

Only the painful (but essentially simple) de-
cision to take one’s fantasies and feelings seri-
ously can at this stage prevent a complete stag-
nation of the inner process of individuation,
because only in this way can a man discover
what this figure means as an inner reality. Thus
the anima becomes again what she originally
was the "woman within/' who conveys the
vital messages of the Self.

Medieval Europe's idea or'courtly
love'' was influenced by the worship
of the Virgin Mary: Ladies to whom
knights pledged love were believed
to be as pure as the Virgin (of
whom a typical medieval image was
the doll-like carving, top of page,
c 1 400) On a 1 5th-century shield,
far left, a knight kneels to his
lady, with death behind him. This
idealized view of woman produced
an opposing view: the belief in
witches. Left, a 1 9th century
painting of a witches' sabbath.

When the anima is projected on to
an "official" personification, she
tends to fall apart into a double
aspect, such as Mary and witch.
Left, another opposing duality
(from a 1 5th-century manuscript):
personifications of the Church
(on the right, identified with
Mary) and of the Synagogue (here
identified with the sinful Eve).

The animus: the man within

The male personification of the unconscious in
woman the animus exhibits both good and
bad aspects, as does the anima in man. But the
animus does not so often appear in the form of
an erotic fantasy or mood; it is more apt to
take the f orm of a hidden “sacred" conviction.
When such a conviction is preached with a
loud, insistent, masculine voice or imposed on
others by means of brutal emotional scenes, the
underlying masculinity in a woman is easily
recognized. However, even in a woman who is
outwardly very feminine the animus can be an
equally hard, inexorable power. One may sud-
denly find oneself up against something in a
woman that is obstinate, cold, and completely
inaccessible.

One of the favorite themes that the animus
repeats endlessly in the ruminations of this kind
of woman goes like this: “The only thing in
tile world that I want is love- and he doesn't
love me"; or “In this situation there are only
two possibilities and both are equally bad."

(The animus never believes in exceptions.) One
can rarely contradict an animus opinion be-
cause it is usually right in a general way; yet
it seldom seems to fit the individual situation.
It is apt to be an opinion that seems reasonable
but beside the point.

Just as the character of a man’s anima is
shaped by his mother, so the animus is basically
influenced by a woman s father. The father
endows his daughter's animus with the special
coloring of unarguable, incontestably "true”
convictions - convictions that never include the
personal reality of the woman herself as she
actually is.

This is why the animus is sometimes, like the
anima, a demon of death. For example, in a
gypsy fairy tale a handsome stranger is received
by a lonely woman in spite of the fact that she
has had a dream warning her that he is the
king of the dead. After he has been with her
for a time, she presses him to tell her who he
really is. At first he refuses, saying that she will

Above, Joan of Arc (played by Ingrid
Bergman in the 1 948 film), whose
animus — the male side of the female
psyche^ took the form of a "sacred
conviction " Right, two images of
the negative animus: a 1 6th-century
painting of a woman dancing with
death; and (from a manuscript c.

1500) Hades with Persephone, whom
he abducted to the underworld.

1 8 ()

Heathcliff. the sinister protagonist
of the British author Emily Bronte s
novel, Wuthermg Heights (1847), is
partly a negative, demonic animus
figure probably a manifestation of
Emily Bronte's own animus In the
montage above, Heathcliff (played
by Laurence Olivier in the 1 939
film) confronts Emily (a portrait
by her brother); in the background.
Wuthering Heights as it is today.

Two examples of dangerous animus
figures: Left, an illustration (by
the 1 9th-century French artist
Gustave Dore) to the folk tale of
Bluebeard Here Bluebeard warns his
wife against opening a certain door
(Of course, she does so and finds
the corpses of Bluebeard s former
wives She is caught, and joins
her predecessors ) Right, a 19th
century painting of the highwayman
Claude Duval, who once robbed a
lady traveler but gave his booty back
on the condition that she dance
with him by the roadside

1 90

die if he tells her. She insists, however, and
suddenly he reveals to her that he is death
himself. The woman immediately dies of fright.

Viewed mythologically, the beautiful stran-
ger is probably a pagan father-image or god-
image, who appears here as king of the dead
like Hades* abduction of Persephone). But
psychologically he represents a particular form
of the animus that lures women away from all
human relationships and especially from all
contacts with real men. He personifies a cocoon
ofdreamy thoughts, filled with desire and judg-
ments about how things “ought to be,” which
cut a woman off from the reality of life.

The negative animus does not appear only
as a death-demon. In myths and fairy tales he
plays the role of robber and murderer. One
example is Bluebeard, who secretly kills all his
wives in a hidden chamber. In this form the
animus personifies all those semiconscious, cold,
destructive reflections that invade a woman in
the small hours, especially when she has failed
to realize some obligation of feeling. It is then
that she begins to think about the family herit-
age and matters of that kind - a sort of web of
calculating thoughts, filled with malice and in-

trigue, which get her into a state where she
even wishes death to others, f When one of us
dies. I'll move to the Riviera,” said a woman
to her husband when she saw the beautiful
Mediterranean coast a thought that was ren-
dered relatively harmless by reason of the fact
that she said it ! .

By nursing secret destructive attitudes, a wife
can drive her husband, and a mother her chil-
dren, into illness, accident, or even death. Or
she may decide to keep the children from
marrying — a deeply hidden form of evil that
rarely comes to the surface of the mother's con-
scious mind. (A naive old woman once said to
me, w hile showing me a picture of her son, who
was drowned when he was 27 : “I prefer it this
way; it's better than giving him away to an-
other woman." )

A strange passivity and paralysis of all feel-
ing, or a dee]) insecurity that can lead almost
to a sense of nullity, may sometimes be the
result of an unconscious animus opinion. In the
depths of the woman's being, the animus whis-
pers: “You are hopeless. What's the use of
trying? There is no point in doing anything.
Life will never change for the better.”

The animus is often personified as
a group of men. A negative group
animus might appear as a dangerous
band of criminals like the wreckers
(above, in an 1 8th-century Italian
painting) who once lured ships onto
rocks with lights, killed survivors,
and looted the wrecks

A frequent personification of the
negative group animus in women's
dreams has been the band of romantic
but dangerous outlaws. Above, an
ominous group of bandits from the
1 953 Brazilian film The Bandit,
concerning an adventurous woman
schoolteacher who falls in love
with a bandit leader.

Below, an illustration by Fuseli of
Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's
Dream. The fairy queen has been
caused (by magic) to fall in love
with a peasant who has been given
an ass's head, also by magic. This
is a comic twist on the tales in
which a girl's love releases a man
from a magic spell.

•u» dr Pivrltr I'rthur ft Ir iliKrf,
««vr* tout rr

inspire

Unfortunately, whenever one of these per-
sonifications of the unconscious takes possession
of our mind, it seems as if we ourselves are hav-
ing such thoughts and feelings. The ego identi-
fies with them to the point where it is unable
to detach them and see them for what they are.
One is really “possessed” by the figure from the
unconscious. Only after the possession has fallen
away does one realize with horror that one has
said and done things diametrically opposed to
one’s real thoughts and feelings — that one has
been the prey of an alien psychic factor.

Like the anima, the animus does not merely
consist of negative qualities such as brutality,
recklessness, empty talk, and silent, obstinate,
evil ideas. He too has a very positive and valu-
able side; he too can build a bridge to the Self
through his creative activity. The following
dream of a woman of 45 may help to illustrate
this point :

Two veiled figures climb onto the balcony and
into the house. They are swathed in black hooded
coats, and they seem to want to torment me and
my sister. She hides under the bed, but they pull
her out with a broom and torture her. Then it is
my turn. The leader of the two pushes me against
the wall, making magical gestures before my face.
In the meantime his helper makes a sketch on
t-he wall, and when I see it, I say (in order to
seem friendly), “Oh! But this is well drawn!”
Now suddenly my tormentor has the noble head
of an artist, and he says proudly, “Yes, indeed,”
and begins to clean his spectacles.

Above left, the singer Franz Grass
in the title role of Wagner's opera
The Flying Dutchman, based on the
tale of the sea captain doomed to
sail a ghost ship until a woman's
love breaks the curse on him.

In many myths a woman's lover is
a figure of mystery whom she must
never try to see. Left, a late ^ 8th-
century engraving of an example
from Greek myth: The maiden Psyche,
loved by Eros but forbidden to try
to look at him. Eventually she did
so and he left her; she was able to
regain his love only after a long
search and much suffering.

The sadistic aspect of these two figures was
well known to the dreamer, for in reality she
frequently suffered bad attacks of anxiety dur-
ing which she was haunted by the thought that
people she loved were in great danger — or even
that they were dead. But the fact that the ani-
mus figure in the dream is double suggests that
the burglars personify a psychic factor that is
dual in its effect, and that could be something
quite different from these tormenting thoughts.
The sister of the dreamer, who runs away from
the men, is caught and tortured. In reality this
sister died when fairly young. She had been
artistically gifted, but had made very little use
of her talent. Next the dream reveals that the
veiled burglars are actually disguised artists,
and that if the dreamer recognizes their gifts
(which are her own), they will give up their evil
intentions.

What is the deeper meaning of the dream?
It is that behind the spasms of anxiety there is
indeed a genuine and mortal danger; but there
is also a creative possibility for the dreamer.
She, like the sister, had some talent as a painter,
but she doubted whether painting could be a
meaningful activity for her. Now her dream
tells her in the most earnest way that she must
live out this talent. If she obeys, the destruc-
tive, tormenting animus will be transformed
into a creative and meaningful activity.

As in this dream, the animus often appears
as a group of men. In this way the unconscious
symbolizes the fact that the animus represents
a collective rather than a personal element.
Because of this collective-mindedness women
habitually refer (when their animus is speaking
through them) to “one” or “they” or “every-
body,” and in such circumstances their speech
frequently contains the words “always” and
“should” and “ought.”

A vast number of myths and fairy tales tell of
a prince, turned by witchcraft into a wild ani-
mal or monster, who is redeemed by the love
of a girl — a process symbolizing the manner in
which the animus becomes conscious. (Dr. Hen-
derson has commented on the significance of
this “Beauty and the Beast” motif in the pre-
ceding chapter.) Very often the heroine is not

193

allowed to ask questions about her mysterious,
unknown lover and husband ; or she meets him
only in the dark and may never look at him.
The implication is that, by blindly trusting and
loving him, she will be able to redeem her
bridegroom. But this never succeeds. She
always breaks her promise and finally finds her
lover again only after a long, difficult quest and
much suffering.

The parallel in life is that the conscious atten-
tion a woman has to give to her animus prob-
lem takes much time and involves a lot of suf-
fering. But if she realizes who and what her
animus is and what he does to her, and if she
faces these realities instead of allowing herself
to be possessed, her animus can turn into an
invaluable inner companion who endows her
with the masculine qualities of initiative, cour-
age, objectivity, and spiritual wisdom.

The animus, just like the anima, exhibits four
stages of development. He first appears as a
personification of mere physical power for
instance, as an athletic champion or “muscle
man.” In the next stage he possesses initiative
and the capacity for planned action. In the
third phase, the animus becomes the “word,”
often appearing as a professor or clergyman.
Finally, in his fourth manifestation, the animus
is the incarnation of meaning . On this highest
level he becomes (like the anima) a mediator
of the religious experience whereby life acquires
new meaning. He gives the woman spiritual
firmness, an invisible inner support that com-
pensates for her outer softness. The animus in
his most developed form sometimes connects
the woman's mind with the spiritual evolution

Embodiments of the four stages
of the animus: First, the wholly
physical man - the fictional
jungle heroTarzan (top, played by
Johnny Weismuller) . Second, the
"romantic'' man the 1 9th-century
British poet Shelley (center left) ;
or the "man of action" America's
Ernest Hemingway, war hero, hunter,
etc Third, the bearer of the word"

— Lloyd George, the great political
orator Fourth, the wise guide to
spiritual truth — often projected
on to Gandhi (left).

Above right, an Indian miniature
of a girl gazing with love at a
man's portrait A woman falling
in love with a picture (or a film
star) is clearly projecting her
animus onto the man. The actor
Rudolph Valentino (right, in a
film made in 1 922) became the
focus of animus projection for
thousands of women while he
lived —and even after he died
Far right, part of the immense floral
tribute sent by women all over the
world to Valentino's funeral in 1 926

of her age, and can thereby make her even
more receptive than a man to new creative
ideas. It is for this reason that in earlier times
women were used by many nations as diviners
and seers. The creative boldness of their posi-
tive animus at times expresses thoughts and
ideas that stimulate men to new enterprises.

The “inner man” within a woman’s psyche
can lead to marital troubles similar to those
mentioned in the section on the anima. What
makes things especially complicated is the fact
that the possession of one partner by the animus
(or anima) may automatically exert such an
irritating effect upon the other that he (or she)
becomes possessed too. Animus and anima
always tend to drag conversation down to a
very low level and to produce a disagreeable,
irascible, emotional atmosphere.

As I mentioned before, the positive side of
the animus can personify an enterprising spirit,
courage, truthfulness, and in the highest form,
spiritual profundity. Through him a woman
can experience the underlying processes of her
cultural and personal objective situation, and
can find her way to an intensified spiritual atti-
tude to life. This naturally presupposes that her
animus ceases to represent opinions that are
above criticism. The woman must find the
courage and inner broadmindedness to question
the sacredness of her own convictions. Only
then will she be able to take in the suggestions
of the unconscious, especially when they con-
tradict her animus opinions. Only then will the
manifestations of the Self get through to her,
and will she be able consciously to understand
their meaning.

The Self: symbols of totality

If an individual has wrestled seriously enough
and long enough with the anima (or animus)
problem so that he, or she, is no longer partially
identified with it, the unconscious again changes
its dominant character and appears in a new
symbolic form, representing the Self, the inner-
most nucleus of the psyche. In the dreams of a
woman this center is usually personified as a
superior female figure — a priestess, sorceress,
earth mother, or goddess of nature or love. In
the case of a man, it manifests itself as a mas-
culine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru),
a wise old man, a spirit of nature, and so forth.
Two folk tales illustrate the role that such a
figure can play. The first is an Austrian tale:

A king has ordered soldiers to keep the night
watch beside the corpse of a black princess, who
has been bewitched. Every midnight she rises and
kills the guard. At last one soldier, whose turn it
is to stand guard, despairs and runs away into
the woods. There he meets an “old guitarist who
is our Lord Himself.” This old musician tells him
where to hide in the church and instructs him
on how to behave so that the black princess can-
not get him. With this divine help the soldier
actually manages to redeem the princess and
marry her.

Clearly, “the old guitarist who is our Lord
Himself” is, in psychological terms, a symbolic
personification of the Self. With his help the
ego avoids destruction and is able to overcome
— and even redeem — a highly dangerous aspect
of his anima.

In a woman’s psyche, as I have said, the Self
assumes feminine personifications. This is illus-
trated in the second story, an Eskimo tale:

A lonely girl who has been disappointed in love
meets a wizard traveling in a copper boat. He is
the “Spirit of the Moon,” who has given all the
animals to mankind and who also bestows luck in
hunting.. He abducts the girl to the heavenly
realm. Once, when the Spirit of the Moon has

left her, she visits a little house near the Moon
Ghost’s mansion. There she finds a tiny woman
clothed in the “intestinal membrane of the
bearded seal,” who warns the heroine against the
Spirit of the Moon, saying that he plans to kill
her. (It appears that he is a killer of women, a
sort of Bluebeard.) The tiny woman fashions a
long rope by means of which the girl can descend
to earth at the time of the new moon, which is
the moment when the little woman can weaken
the Moon Spirit. The girl climbs down, but when
she arrives on earth, she does not open her eyes
as quickly as the little woman told her to. Because
of this, she is turned into a spider and can never
become human again.

As we have noted, the divine musician in the
first tale is a representation of the “wise old
man,” a typical personification of the Self. He
is akin to the sorcerer Merlin of medieval
legend or to the Greek god Hermes. The little
woman in her strange membrane-clothing is a
parallel figure, symbolizing the Self as it
appears in the feminine psyche. The old musi-
cian saves the hero from the destructive anima,
and the little woman protects the girl against
the Eskimo “Bluebeard” (who is, in the form of
the Moon Spirit, her animus). In this case, how-
ever, things go wrong — a point that I shall take
up later.

The Self, however, does not always take the
form of a wise old man or wise old woman.
These paradoxical personifications are attempts
to express something that is not entirely con-
tained in time — something simultaneously
young and old. The dream of a middle-aged
man shows the Self appearing as a young man :

Coming from the street, a youth rode down
into our garden. (There were no bushes and no
fence as there are in real life, and the garden lay
open.) I did not quite know if he came on pur-
pose, or if the horse carried him here against
his will.

I stood on the path that leads to my studio and
watched the arrival with great pleasure. The sight

196

The Self — the inner center of the
total psyche — is often personified
in dreams as a superior human
figure. To women, the Self might
appear as a wise and powerful
goddess — like the ancient Greek
mother goddess Demeter (right,
shown with her son T riptolemus
and daughter Kore, in a fifth -
century-B.c. relief). The "fairy
godmother" of many tales is also
a symbolic personification of the
female Self: above, Cinderella's
godmother (from an illustration
by Gustave Dore) Below, a helpful
old woman (also a fairy godmother)
rescues a girl in an illustration of a
Hans Christian Andersen tale.

Personifications of the Self in
men's dreams often take the form
of "wise old men." Far left, the
magician Merlin of the Arthurian
legends (in a 14th-century English
manuscript). Center, a guru
(wise man) from an 1 8th-century
Indian painting. Left, a winged
old man like this appeared in one
of Dr. Jung's own dreams carrying
keys: according to Dr. Jung he
represented "superior insight."

Thomas Sully. Washington at the
Passage of the Delaware. Courtesy
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Self usually appears in dreams
at crucial times in the dreamer's
life — turning points when his basic
attitudes and whole way of life are
changing. The change itself is
often symbolized by the action of
crossing water. Above, an actual
river crossing that accompanied
an important upheaval: George
Washington's crossing of the
Delaware River during the American
Revolution (in a 1 9th-century
American painting). Left, another
major event that involved crossing
water: the first attack launched
against the Normandy beaches on
D-day, June 1 944.

198

The Self is not always personified
as a superior old person Left, a
painting (of a dream) by Peter
Birkhauser, in which the Self
appears as a marvelous youth.

While the artist was working on
the painting, other associations and
ideas came up from his unconscious.
The round object like a sun behind
the youth is a symbol of totality,
and the boy's four arms recall other
"fourfold” symbols that characterize
psychological wholeness. Before the
boy's hands hovers a flower— as if
he need only raise his hands and a
magical flower will appear. He is
black because of his nocturnal (i.e.
unconscious) origin.

of tlx* boy on his beautiful horse impressed me
deeply.

The horse was a small, wild, powerful animal,
a symbol of energy (it resembled a boar), and it
had a thick, bristly, silvery-gray coat. The boy
rode past me between the studio and house,
jumped off his horse, and led him carefully away
so that he would not trample on the flower bed
with its beautiful red and orange tulips. The
flower bed had been newly made and planted by
my wife (a dream occurrence).

This youth signifies the Self, and with it re-
newal of life, a creative elan vital , and a new
spiritual orientation by means of which every-
thing becomes full of life and enterprise.

If a man devotes himself to the instructions
of his own unconscious, it can bestow this gift,
so that suddenly life, which has been stale and
dull, turns into a rich, unending inner adven-
ture, full of creative possibilities. In a woman's
psychology, this same youthful personification
of the Self can appear as a supernaturally gifted
girl. The dreamer in this instance is a woman
in her late forties:

I stood in front of a church and was washing
the pavement with water. Then 1 ran down the
street just at the moment when the students from
the high school were let out. I came to a stagnant
river across which a board or tree trunk had been
laid; but when I was attempting to walk across,
a mischievous student bounced on the board so
that it cracked and I nearly fell into the water.

“Idiot!” I yelled out. On the other side of the
river three little girls were playing, and one of
them stretched out her hand as if to help me. I
thought that her small hand was not strong
enough to help me, but when I took it, she suc-
ceeded, without the slightest effort, in pulling me
across and up the bank on the other side.

The dreamer is a religious person, but
according to her dream she cannot remain in
the Church (Protestant) any longer; in fact, she
seems to have lost the possibility of entering it,
although she tries to keep the access to it as
clean as she can. According to the dream, she
must now cross a stagnant river, and this indi-
cates that the flow of life is slowed down
because of the unresolved religious problem.
(Crossing a river is a frequent symbolic image
for a fundamental change of attitude.) The
student was interpreted by the dreamer herself
as the personification of a thought that she had
previously had — namely, that she might satisfy
her spiritual yearning by attending high school.
Obviously the dream does not think much of
this plan. When she dares to cross the river
alone, a personification of the Self (the girl),
small but supernaturally powerful, helps her.

But the form of a human being, whether
youthful or old, is only one of the many ways
in which the Self can appear in dreams or
visions. The various ages it assumes show not
only that it is with us throughout the wTole of
life, but also that it exists beyond the con-

199

Many people today personify the
Self in their dreams as prominent
public figures Jungian psychologists
find that, in men's dreams,

Dr. Albert Schweitzer (far left) and
Sir Winston Churchill (left)
often appear; in women's dreams,
Eleanor Roosevelt (right) and
Queen Elizabeth II (far right, a
portrait on an African house)

sciouslv realized flow of life — which is w'hat
creates our experience of time.

Just as the Self is not entirely contained in
our conscious experience of time (in our space-
time dimension), it is also simultaneously omni-
present. Moreover, it appears frequently in a
form that hints at a special omnipresence; that
is, it manifests itself as a gigantic, symbolic
human being who embraces and contains the
whole cosmos. When this image turns up in the
dreams of an individual, we may hope for a
creative solution to his conflict, because now
the vital psychic center is activated (i.e. the
whole being is condensed into oneness) in order
to overcome the difficulty.

It is no wonder that this figure of the Cosmic
Man appears in many myths and religious
teachings. Generally he is described as some-
thing helpful and positive. He appears as
Adam, as the Persian Gayomart, or as the
Hindu Purusha. This figure may even be de-
scribed as the basic principle of the whole world.
The ancient Chinese, for instance, thought that
before anything whatever was created, there
was a colossal divine man called P'an Ku who
gave heaven and earth their form. When he
cried, his tears made the Yellow River and the
Yangtze River; when he breathed, the wind
rose; when he spoke, thunder was loosed; and
wffien he looked around, lightning flashed. If he
w r as in a good mood, the weather was fine; if
he was sad, it clouded over. When he died, he
fell apart, and from his body the five holy
mountains of China sprang into existence. His
head became the T'ai mountain in the East,
his trunk became the Sung mountain in the cen-
ter, his right arm the Heng mountain in the
North, his left arm the Heng mountain in the
South, and his feet the Hua mountain in the
West. His eyes became the sun and moon.

We have already seen that symbolic struc-
tures that seem to refer to the process of indi-
viduation tend to be based on the motif of the
number four — such as the four functions of
consciousness, or the four stages of the anima
or animus. It reappears here in the cosmic
shape of P'an Ku. Only under specific circum-
stances do other combinations of numbers
appear in the psychic material. The natural un-
hampered manifestations of the center are
characterized by fourfoldness— that is to say, by
having four divisions, or some other structure
deriving from the numerical series of 4, 8, 16,
and so on. Number 16 plays a particularly im-
portant role, since it is composed of four fours.

In our Western civilization, similar ideas of
a Cosmic Man have attached themselves to the
symbol of Adam, the First Man. There is a
Jewish legend that when God created Adam,
he first gathered red, black, white, and yellow
dust from the four corners of the world, and
thus Adam "reached from one end of the world
to the other." When he bent down, his head
was in the East and his feet in the West.
According to another Jewish tradition, the
whole of mankind was contained in Adam from
the beginning, which meant the soul of every-
body who w'ould ever be born. The soul of
Adam, therefore, was "like the wick of a lamp
composed of innumerable strands." In this
symbol the idea of a total oneness of all human
existence, beyond all indiv idual units, is clearly
expressed.

In ancient Persia, the same original First
Man - called Gayomart — w ; as depicted as a
huge figure emitting light. When he died, every
kind of metal sprang from his body, and from
his soul came gold. His semen fell upon the
earth, and from it came the first human couple
in the form of two rhubarb shrubs. It is striking

200

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that the Chinese P’an Ku was also depicted
covered by leaves like a plant. Perhaps this is
because the First Man was thought of as a self-
grown, living unit that just existed without any
animal impulse or self-will. Among a group of
people who live on the banks of the Tigris,
Adam is still, at the present time, worshiped as
the hidden “super-soul" or mystical "protective
spirit" of the entire human race. These people
say that he came from a date palm- another
repetition of the plant motif.

In the East, and in some gnostic circles in the
West, people soon recognized that the Cosmic
Man was more an inner psychic image than a
concrete outer reality. According to Hindu
tradition, for instance, he is something that lives
within the individual human being and is the
only part that is immortal. This inner Great
Man redeems the individual by leading him
out of creation and its sufferings, back into his
original eternal sphere. But he can do this only
if man recognizes him and rises from his sleep
in order to be led. In the symbolic myths of

old India, this figure is known as the Purusha,
a name that simply means “man” or “per-
son.” The Purusha lives within the heart of
every individual, and yet at the same time he
fills the entire cosmos.

According to the testimony of many myths,
the Cosmic Man is not only the beginning but
also the final goal of all life— of the whole of
creation. “All cereal nature means wheat, all
treasure nature means gold, all generation
means man," says the medieval sage Meister
Eckhart. And if one looks at this from a psy-
chological standpoint, it is certainly so. The
whole inner psychic reality of each individual
is ultimately oriented toward this archetypal
symbol of the Self.

In practical terms this means that the exist-
ence of human beings will never be satisfactorily
explained in terms of isolated instincts or pur-
posive mechanism such as hunger, power, sex,
survival, perpetuation of the species, and so on.
That is, man's main purpose is not to eat, drink,
etc., but to be human. Above and beyond these
drives, our inner psychic reality serves to mani-
fest a living mystery that can be expressed only
by a symbol, and for its expression the uncon-
scious often chooses the powerful image of the
Cosmic Man.

In our Western civilization the Cosmic Man
has been identified to a great extent with Christ,
and in the East with Krishna or with Buddha.
In the Old Testament this same symbolic figure
turns up as the “Son of Man" and in later
Jewish mysticism is called Adam Kadmon.
Certain religious movements of late antiquity
simply called him Anthropos (the Greek word
for man). Like all symbols this image points to

Top left, a Rhodesian rock painting
of a creation myth, in which the
First Man (the moon) mates with
the morning star and evening star
to produce the creatures of earth
Cosmic Man often appears as an
Adam like original man — and Christ,
too, has become identified with
this personification of the Self:

Top right, a painting by the 1 5th-
century German artist Grunewald
shows the figure of Christ with
all the majesty of Cosmic Man

202

an unknowable secret — to the ultimate un-
known meaning of human existence.

As we have noted, certain traditions assert
that the Cosmic Man is the goal of creation,
but the achievement ofthisshould not be under-
stood as a possible external happening. From
the point of view of the Hindu, for example, it
is not so much that the external world will one
day dissolve into the original Great Man, but
that the ego's extraverted orientation toward
the external world will disappear in order to
make way for the Cosmic Man. This happens
when the ego merges into the Self. The ego’s
discursive flow of representations (which goes
from one thought to another) and its desires
(which run from one object to another) calm
down when the Great Man within is encount-
ered. Indeed, we must never forget that for us
outer reality exists only in so far as we perceive
it consciously, and that we cannot prove that
it exists “in and by itself."

The many examples coming from various
civilizations and different periods show the uni-

Examples of the "royal couple" (a
symbolic image of psychic totality
and the Self): left, a third century
a.d Indian sculpture of Siva and
Parvati, hermaphroditically joined;
below, the Hindu deities Krishna
and Radha in a grove.

The Greek head, below left, was
shown by Dr. Jung to be subtly two-
sided (i.e. hermaphroditic). In
a letter to the owner Jung added
that the head "has, like his analogs
Adonis, Tammuz, and . Baldur, all
the grace and charm of either sex."

203

Right, a pre Roman sculpture of the
Celtic bear-goddess Artio, found
at Berne (which means "bear").

She was probably a mother goddess,
resembling the she-bear in the
dream quoted on this page Further
correspondences to symbolic images
in this dream: Center. Australian
aborigines with their "sacred
stones," which they believe contain
the spirits of the dead Bottom,
from a 1 7th-century alchemical
manuscript, the symbolic royal
couple as a pair of lions.

versality of the symbol of the Great Man. His
image is present in the minds of men as a sort
of goal or expression of the basic mystery of
our life. Because this symbol represents that
which is whole and complete, it is often con-
ceived of as a bisexual being. In this I'orm the
symbol reconciles one of the most important
pairs of psychological opposites— male and
female. This union also appears frequently in
dreams as a divine, royal, or otherwise distin-
guished couple. The following dream of a man
of 47 shows this aspect of the Self in a dra-
matic way :

I am on a platform, and below me I see a huge,
black, beautiful she-bear with a rough but well-
groomed coat. She is standing on her hind legs,
and on a stone slab she is polishing a flat oval
black stone, which becomes increasingly shiny.
Not far away a lioness and her cub do the same
thing, but the stones they are polishing are bigger
and round in shape. After a while the she-bear
turns into a fat, naked woman with black hair
and dark, fiery eyes. I behave in an erotically pro-
vocative wav toward her, and suddenly she moves
nearer in order to catch me. I get frightened and
take refuge up on the building of sea Holding
where I was before. Later I am in the midst of
many women, half of whom are primitive and
have rich black hair (as if they are transformed
from animals); the other half are our women [of'
the same nationality as the dreamer] and have
blonde or brown hair. The primitive women sing
a very sentimental song in melancholy, high-
pitched voices. Now, in a high elegant carriage,
there comes a young man who wears on his head
a royal golden crown, set with shining rubies

204

a very beautiful sight. Beside him sits a blonde
young woman, probably his wife, but without a
crown. It seems that the lioness and her cub have
been transformed into this couple. They belong
to the group of primitives. Now all the women
(the primitives and the others) intone a solemn
song, and the royal carriage slowly travels toward
the horizon.

Here the inner nucleus of the dreamer's
psyche shows itself at first in a temporary vision
of the royal couple, which emerges from the
depths of his animal nature and the primitive
layer of his unconscious. The she-bear in the
beginning is a sort of mother goddess. (Artemis,
for instance, was worshiped in Greece as a she-
bear.) The dark oval stone that she rubs and
polishes probably symbolizes the dreamer's in-
nermost being, his true personality. Rubbing
and polishing stones is a well-known, exceed-
ingly ancient activity of man. In Europe '‘holy"
stones, wrapped in bark and bidden in caves,
have been found in many places; as containers
ofdivine powers they were probably kept there
by men of the Stone Age. At the present time
some of the Australian aborigines believe that
their dead ancestors continue to exist in stones
as virtuous and divine powers, and that if they
rub these stones, the power increases (like
charging them with electricity) for the benefit
of both the living and the dead.

The man who had the dream we are discus-
sing had hitherto refused to accept a marital
bond with a woman. His fear of being caught
by this aspect of life caused him, in the dream,
to fiee from the bear-woman to the spectator's
platform where he could passively watch things
without becoming entangled. Through the
motif of the stone being rubbed by the bear, the
unconscious is trying to show' him that he should
let himself come into contact with this side of
life; it is through the frictions of married life
that his inner being can be shaped and polished.

When the stone is polished, it will begin to
shine like a mirror so that the bear can see her-
self in it; this means that only by accepting
earthly contact and suffering can the human
soul be transformed into a mirror in which the
divine powers can perceive themselves. But the

In dreams a mirror can symbolize
the power of the unconscious to
"mirror'' the individual objectively
giving him a view of himself that
he may never have had before. Only
through the unconscious can such a
view (which often shocks and upsets
the conscious mind) be obtained —
just as in Greek myth the Gorgon
Medusa, whose look turned men to
stone, could be gazed upon only in
a mirror. Below, Medusa reflected
in a shield (a painting by the 1 7th
century artist Caravaggio).

dreamer runs away to a higher place i.e. into
all sorts of reflections by which he can escape
the demands of life. The dream then shows him
that if he runs away from the demands of life,
one part of his soul (his anima) will remain
undifferentiated, a fact symbolized by the group
of nondescript women that splits apart into a
primitive half and a more civilized one.

The lioness and her son, which then appear
on the scene, personify the mysterious urge to-
ward individuation, indicated by their work at
shaping the round stones. (A round stone is a
symbol of the Self.) The lions, a royal couple,
arc in themselves a symbol of totality. In medi-
eval symbolism, the “philosopher's stone" (a

205

pre-eminent symbol of man's wholeness) is re-
presented as a pair of lions or as a human
couple riding on lions. Symbolically, this points
to the fact that often the urge toward individu-
ation appears in a veiled form, hidden in the
overwhelming passion one may feel for another
person. (In fact, passion that goes beyond the
natural measure of love ultimately aims at the
mystery of becoming whole, and this is why one
feels, when one has fallen passionately in love,
that becoming one with the other person is the
only worthwhile goal of one’s life.)

As long as the image of totality in this dream
expresses itself in the form of a pair of lions, it
is still contained in some such overwhelming
passion. But when lion and lioness have turned
into a king and queen, the urge to individuate
has reached the level of conscious realization,
and can now be understood by the ego as being
the real goal of life.

Before the lions had transformed themselves
into human beings, it was only the primitive
women who sang, and they did so in a senti-
mental manner; that is to say, the feelings of
the dreamer remained on a primitive and sen-
timental level. But in honor of the humanized
lions, both the primitive and the civilized
women chant a common hymn of praise. Their
expression of their feelings in a united form
shows that the inner split in the animal has now
changed into inner harmony.

Still another personification of the Self
appears in a report of a woman’s so-called
'‘active imagination.” (Active imagination is a
certain way of meditating imaginatively, by

Often the Self is represented as a
helpful animal (a symbol of the
psyche's instinctual basis). Top left,
the magic fox of Grimm'sfairy tale
"The Golden Bird." Center, the
Hindu monkey god Hanuman
carrying two gods in his heart.

Bottom, Rrn Tin Tin the heroic dog
once popular in American films and
television.

Stones are frequent images of the
Self (because they are complete —
i.e. unchanging — and lasting).

Many people today look for stones
of special beauty — perhaps on
beaches, top right Some Hindus
pass from father to son stones
(center) believed to have magical
powers. "Precious" stones, like the
jewels of Queen Elizabeth I (1 558
1 603), bottom, are an outward
sign of wealth and position.

which one may deliberately enter into contact
with the unconscious and make a conscious
connection with psychic phenomena. Active
imagination is among the most important of
Jung’s discoveries. While it is in a sense com-
parable to Eastern forms of meditation, such as
the technique of Zen Buddhism or of Tantric
Yoga, or to Western techniques like those of
the Jesuit Exercitia, it is fundamentally differ-
ent in that the meditator remains completely
devoid of any conscious goal or program. Thus
the meditation becomes the solitary experiment
of a free individual, which is the reverse of a
guided attempt to master the unconscious. This,
however, is not the place to enter into a de-
tailed analysis of active imagination ; the reader
will find one of Jung’s descriptions of it in his
paper on "The Transcendent Function/')

I n the woman’s meditation the Self appeared
as a deer, which said to the ego: “I am your
child and your mother. They call me the "con-
necting animal' because I connect people, ani-
mals, and even stones with one another if I enter
them. I am your fate or the ‘objective 1/ When
I appear, 1 redeem you from the meaningless
hazards of life. The fire burning inside me burns
in the whole of nature. If a man loses it, he
becomes egocentric, lonely, disoriented, and
weak."

The Self is often symbolized as an animal,
representing our instinctive nature and its con-
nectedness with one's surroundings. (That is
why there are so many helpful animals in
myths and fairy tales. ) This relation of the Self
to all surrounding nature and even the cosmos
probably comes from the fact that the “nuclear
atom" of our psyche is somehow woven into
the whole world, both outer and inner. All the
higher manifestations of life are somehow- tuned
to the surrounding space-time continuum.
Animals, for example, have their own special
foods, their particular home-building materials,
and their definite territories, to all of which
their instinctive patterns are exactly tuned and
adapted. Time rhythms also play their part:
We have only to think of the fact that most
grass-eating animals have their young at pre-
cisely the time of year when the grass is richest

207

and most abundant. With such considerations
in mind, a well-known zoologist has said that
the “inwardness" of each animal reaches far
out into the world around it and “psychifies"
time and space.

In ways that are still completely beyond our
comprehension, our unconscious is similarly
attuned to our surroundings to our group, to
society in general, and, beyond these, to the
space-time continuum and the whole of nature.
Thus the Great Man of the Naskapi Indians
does not merely reveal inner truths; he also
gives hints about where and when to hunt. And
so from dreams the Naskapi hunter evolves the
words and melodies of the magical songs with
which he attracts the animals.

But this specific help from the unconscious
is not given to primitive man alone. Jung dis-
covered that dreams can also give civilized man
the guidance he needs in finding his way
through the problems of both his inner and his
outer life. Indeed, many of our dreams are con-
cerned with details of our outer file and our
surroundings. Such things as the tree in front
of the window, one's bicycle or car, or a stone
picked up during a walk may be raised to the

level of symbolism through our dream life and
become meaningful. If we pay attention to our
dreams, instead of living in a cold, impersonal
world of meaningless chance, we may begin to
emerge into a world of our own, full of impor-
tant and secretly ordered events.

Our dreams, however, are not as a rule
primarily concerned with our adaptation to
outer life. In our civilized world, most dreams
have to do with the development (by the ego)
of the “right" inner attitude toward the Self,
for this relationship is far more disturbed in us
by modern ways of thinking and behaving than
is the case with primitive people. They gen-
erally live directly from the inner center, but
we, with our uprooted consciousness, are so
entangled with external, completely foreign
matters that it is very difficult for the messages
of the Self to get through to us. Our conscious
mind continually creates the illusion ofa clearly
shaped, “real" outer world that blocks ofTmany
other perceptions. Yet through our unconscious
nature we are inexplicably connected to our
psychic and physical environment.

I have already mentioned the fact that the
Self is symbolized with special frequency in the

The 'eternal'' quality of stones can
be seen in pebbles or mountains
Left, rocks beneath Mt. Williamson,
California Thus stone has always
been used for memorials— like the
heads of four U S. presidents
(above) carved in the cliff face
of Mt. Rushmore, South Dakota
Stones were also often used to mark
places of worship — as was the sacred
stone in the Temple of Jerusalem
(far right). It was the center of
the city; and (as the medieval map,
right, shows) the city was seen as
the center of the world.

form of a stone, precious or otherwise. We saw
an example of this in the stone that was being
polished by the she-bear and the lions. In many
dreams the nuclear center, the Self, also appears
as a crystal. The mathematically precise
arrangement of a crystal evokes in us the intui-
tive feeling that even in so-called “dead” mat-
ter there is a spiritual ordering principle at
work. Thus the crystal often symbolically stands
for the union of extreme opposites — of matter
and spirit.

Perhaps crystals and stones are especially apt
symbols of the Self because of the “just-so-ness”
of their nature. Many people cannot refrain
from picking up stones of a slightly unusual
color or shape and keeping them, without know-
ing why they do this. It is as if the stones held
a living mystery that fascinates them. Men have
collected stones since the beginning of time and
have apparently assumed that certain ones were
the containers of the life-force with all its mys-
tery. The ancient Germans, for instance, be-
lieved that the spirits of the dead continued to
live in their tombstones. The custom of placing
stones on graves may spring partly from the
symbolic idea that something eternal of the dead

person remains, which can be most fittingly
represented by a stone. For while the human
being is as dififerent as possible 1'rom a stone, yet
man’s innermost center is in a strange and
special way akin to it ( perhaps because the stone
symbolizes mere existence at the farthest remove
from the emotions, feelings, fantasies, and
discursive thinking of ego-consciousness j . In
this sense the stone symbolizes what is perhaps
the simplest and deepest experience - the ex-
perience of something eternal that man can
have in those moments when he feels immortal
and unalterable.

The urge that we find in practically all civili-
zations to erect stone monuments to famous
men or on the site of important events probably
also stems from this symbolic meaning of the
stone. The stone that Jacob placed on the spot
where he had his famous dream, or certain
stones left by simple people on the tombs of
local saints or heroes, show the original nature
of the human urge to express an otherwise inex-
pressible experience by the stone-symbol. It is
no wonder that many religious cults use a stone
to signify God or to mark a place of worship.
The holiest sanctuary of the Islamic world is the

PI

Ka'aba, the black stone in Mecca to which all
pious Moslems hope to make their pilgrimage.

According to Christian ecclesiastical sym-
bolism, Christ is “the stone which the builders
rejected,” which became “the head of the cor-
ner” (Luke xx: 17). Alternatively he is called
the “spiritual rock” from which the water of
life springs (1 Cor. x: 4). Medieval alchemis.ts,
who searched for the secret of matter in a pre-
scientific way, hoping to find God in it, or
at least the working of divine activity, believed
that this secret was embodied in their famous
“philosopher’s stone.” But some of the alche-
mists dimly perceived that their much-sought-
after stone was a symbol of something that can
be found only within the psyche of man. An
old Arabian alchemist, Morienus, said: “This
thing [the philosopher’s stone] is extracted from
you: you are its mineral, and one can find it
in you; or, to put it more clearly, they [the
alchemists] take it from you. If you recognize
this, the love and approbation of the stone will
grow within you. Know that this is true with-
out doubt.”

The alchemical stone (the lapis) symbolizes
something that can never be lost or dissolved,
something eternal that some alchemists com-
pared to the mystical experience of God within
one’s own soul. It usually takes prolonged
suffering to burn away all the superfluous
psychic elements concealing the stone. But some
profound inner experience of the Selfdoes occur
to most people at least once in a lifetime. From
the psychological standpoint, a genuinely reli-
gious attitude consists of an effort to discover
this unique experience, and gradually to keep
in tune with it (it is relevant that a stone is
itself something permanent] , so that the Self be-
comes an inner partner toward whom cue's
attention is continually turned.

The fact that this highest and most frequent
symbol of the Self is an object of lifeless mat-
ter points to yet another field of inquiry and
speculation: that is, the still unknown relation-
ship between what we call the unconscious
psyche and what we call “matter”-- a mystery
with which psychosomatic medicine endeavors
to grapple. In studying this still undefined and

Left, the Black Stone of Mecca,
blessed by Mohammed (in an Arabic
manuscript illustration) to integrate
it into the Islamic religion. It is
carried by four tribal chieftains
(at the four corners of a carpet)
into the Ka'aba, the holy sanctuary
to which thousands of Moslems make
an annual pilgrimage (below left).

Right, another symbolic stone:
the Stone of Scone (or Stone of
Destiny) on which Scottish kings
were formerly crowned. It was taken
to England’s Westminster Abbey in
the 1 3th century, but it never lost
its importance for Scotland. On
Christmas Day, 1 950, a group of
Scottish Nationalists stole the
Stone from the Abbey and took it
back to Scotland. (It was returned
to the Abbey in April 1 951 )

Right, a tourist kisses the famous
''Blarney Stone'' of Irish legend It
is supposed to confer the gift of
eloquence on those who kiss it.

unexplained connection (it may prove to be that
“psyche” and “matter” are actually the same
phenomenon, one observed from “within” and
the other from “without”), Dr. Jung put for-
ward a new concept that he called synchroni-
city. This term means a “meaningful coinci-
dence” of outer and inner events that are not
themselves causally connected. The emphasis
lies on the word “meaningful.”

If an aircraft crashes before my eyes as I am
blowing my nose, this is a coincidence of events
that has no meaning. It is simply a chance
occurrence of a kind that happens all the time.
But if I bought a blue frock and, by mistake,
the shop delivered a black one on the day one
of my near relatives died, this would be a
meaningful coincidence. The two events are not
causally related, but they are connected by the
symbolic meaning that our society gives to the
color black.

Wherever Dr. Jung observed such meaningful
coincidences in an individual’s life, it seemed (as
the individual’s dreams revealed) that there
was an archetype activated in the unconscious
of the individual concerned. To illustrate this by
my example of the black frock: In such a case
the person who receives the black frock might
also have had a dream on the theme of death.
It seems as if the underlying archetype is mani-
festing itself simultaneously in inner and exter-
nal events. The common denominator is a
symbolically expressed message — in this case a
message about death.

As soon as we notice that certain types of
event “like” to cluster together at certain times,
we begin to understand the attitude of the
Chinese, whose theories of medicine, philoso-
phy, and even building are based on a “science"
of meaningful coincidences. The classical Chi-
nese texts did not ask what causes what, but
rather what “likes” to occur with what. One can

A painting by the modern artist
Hans Haffenrichter resembles the
pattern of a crystal — like ordinary
stone, a symbol of wholeness.

see much the same underlying theme in astro-
logy, and in the way various civilizations have
depended on consulting oracles and paying at-
tention to omens. All of these are attempts to
provide an explanation of coincidence that is
different from one that depends on straightfor-
ward cause and effect.

In creating the concept of synchronicity, Dr.
Jung sketched a way in which we might pene-
trate deeper into the inter-relation of psyche
and matter. And it is precisely toward such a
relation that the symbol of the stone seems to
point. But this is still a completely open and
insufficiently explored matter, with which
future generations of psychologists and physi-
cists must deal.

It may seem that my discussion of synchroni-
city has led me away from my main theme, but
I feel it is necessary to make at least a brief
introductory reference to it because it is a
Jungian hypothesis that seems to be pregnant
with future possibilities of investigation and
application. Synchronistic events, moreover,
almost invariably accompany the crucial phases
of the process of individuation. But too often
they pass unnoticed, because the individual has
not learned to watch for such coincidences and
to make them meaningful in relation to the
symbolism of his dreams.

21 i

The relation to the Self

Nowadays more and more people, especially
those who live in large cities, suffer from a ter-
rible emptiness and boredom, as if they were
waitingforsomethingthat never arrives. Movies
and television, spectator sports and political
excitements may divert them for a while, but
again and again, exhausted and disenchanted,
they have to return to the wasteland of their
own lives.

The only adventure that is still worthwhile
for modern man lies in the inner realm of the
unconscious psyche. With this idea vaguely in
mind, many now turn to Yoga and other
Eastern practices. But these offer no genuine
new adventure, for in them one only takes over
what is already known to the Hindus or the
Chinese without directly meeting one’s own
inner life center. While it is true that Eastern
methods serve to concentrate the mind and
direct it inward (and that this procedure is in
a sense similar to the introversion of an analy-
tical.treatment), there isa very important differ-
ence. Jung evolved a way of getting' to one’s
inner center and making contact with the living
mystery of the unconscious, alone and unaided.
That is utterly different from following a well-
worn path.

Trying to give the living reality of the Self
a constant amount of daily attention is like
trying to live simultaneously on two levels or in
two different worlds. One gives one’s mind, as

before, to outer duties, but at the same time
one remains alert for hints and signs, both in
dreams and in external events, that the Self
uses to symbolize its intentions — the direction in
which the life-stream is moving.

Old Chinese texts that are concerned with
this kind of experience often use the simile of
the cat watching the mousehole. One text says
that one should allow no other thoughts to in-
trude, but one’s attention should not be too
sharp — nor should it be too dull. There is
exactly the right level of perception. “If the
training is undergone in this manner ... it will
be effective as time goes on, and when the cause
comes to fruition, like a ripe melon that auto-
matically falls, anything it may happen to
touch or make contact with will suddenly cause
the individual’s supreme awakening. This is the
moment when the practitioner will be like one
who drinks water and alone knows whether it
is cold or warm. He becomes free of all doubts
about himself and experiences a great happiness
similar to that one feels in meeting one’s own
father at the crossroads.”

Thus, in the midst of ordinary outer life,
one is suddenly caught up in an exciting inner
adventure; and because it is unique for each
individual, it cannot be copied or stolen.

There are two main reasons why man loses
contact with the regulating center of his soul.
One of them is that some single instinctive drive

or emotional image can carry him into a one-
sidedness that makes him lose his balance. This
also happens to animals; for example, a sexu-
ally excited stag will completely forget hunger
and security. This one-sidedness and consequent
loss of balance are much dreaded by primitives,
who call it “loss of soul/' Another threat to the
inner balance comes from excessive daydream-
ing, which in a secret way usually circles around
particular complexes. In fact, daydreams arise
just because they connect a man with his com-
plexes; at the same time they threaten the con-
centration and continuity of his consciousness.

The second obstacle is exactly the opposite,
and is due to an over-consolidation of ego-
consciousness. Although a disciplined conscious-
ness is necessary for the performance of civilized
activities (we know what happens if a railway
signalman lapses into daydreaming), it has the
serious disadvantage that it is apt to block the
reception ofimpulses and messages coming from
the center. This is why so many dreams of
civilized people are concerned with restoring
this receptivity by attempting to correct the
attitude of consciousness toward the uncon-
scious center or Self.

Among the mythological representations of
the Self one finds much emphasis on the four
corners of the world, and in many pictures the
Great Man is represented in the center of a
circle divided into four. Jung used the Hindu

word mandala (magic circle) to designate a
structure of this order, which is a symbolic re-
presentation of the “nuclear atom'' of the
human psyche — whose essence we do not know.
In this connection it is interesting that a Nas-
kapi hunter pictorially represented his Great
Man not as a human being but as a mandala.

Whereas the Naskapi experience the inner
center directly and naively, without the help of
religious rites or doctrines, other communities
use the mandala motif in order to restore a lost
inner balance. Forinstance, the Navaho Indians
try, by means of mandala-structured sand
paintings, to bring a sick person back into har-
mony with himself and with the cosmos- and
thereby to restore his health.

In Eastern civilizations similar pictures arc
used to consolidate the inner being, or to enable
one to plunge into deep meditation. The con-
templation of a mandala is meant to bring an
inner peace, a feeling that life has again found
its meaning and order. The mandala also con-
veys this feeling when it appears spontaneously
in the dreams of modern men who are not influ-
enced by any religious tradition of this sort and
know nothing about it. Perhaps the positive
effect is even greater in such cases because
knowledge and tradition sometimes bl ur or even
block the spontaneous experience.

An example of a spontaneously produced
mandala occurs in the following dream of a 62 -

The feel i ngs of boredom and apathy
from which city dwellers today often
suffer is only temporarily offset
by such artificial excitements as
adventure films (far left) and time-
killing amusements" (left) Jung
stressed that the only real adventure
remaining for each individual is the
exploration of his own unconscious.
The ultimate goal of such a search
is the forming of a harmonious and
balanced relationship with the Self.
The circular mandala images this
perfect balance —embodied in the
structure of the modern cathedral
(right) of the city of Brasilia.

Top, a Navaho makes a sand painting
(a mandala) in a heating ritual; the
patient sits in the painting. Above,
a plan of a sand painting; it must be
circled by a patient before entering.

Left, a winter landscape by the
German artist Kaspar Friedrich.
Landscape paintings usually express
indefinable "moods” — as do
symbolic landscapes in dreams.

year-old woman. It emerged as a prelude to a
new phase of life in which she became very
creative :

I see a landscape in a dim light. In the back-
ground I see the rising and then evenly continu-
ing crest of a hill. Along the line where it rises
moves a quadrangular disk that shines like gold.
In the foreground I see dark plowed earth that is
beginning to sprout. Now I suddenly perceive a
round table with a gray stone slab as its top, and
at the same moment the quadrangular disk sud-
denly stands upon the table. It has left the hill,
but how and why it has changed its place I do
not know.

Landscapes in dreams (as well as in art) fre-
quently symbolize an inexpressible mood. In
this dream, the dim ligh t of the landscape indi-
cates that the clarity of daytime consciousness
is dimmed. “Inner nature'’ may now begin to
reveal itself in its own light, so we are told that
the quadrangular disk becomes visible on the
horizon. Hitherto the symbol of the Self, the
disk, had been largely an intuitive idea on the
dreamer’s mental horizon, butnowin thedream
it shifts its position and becomes the center of
the landscape of her soul. A seed, sown long
ago, begins to sprout: for a long time previ-
ously the dreamer had paid careful attention
to her dreams, and now this work bears fruit.
(One is reminded of the relation between the
symbol of the Great Man and plant life, which

I mentioned before.) Now the golden disk sud-
denly moves to the “right” side— the side where
things become conscious. Among other things
“right” often means, psychologically, the side
of consciousness, of'adaptation, of being “right,”
while “left” signifies the sphere of unadapted,
unconscious reactions or sometimes even of
something “sinister.” Then, finally, the golden
disk stops its movement and comes to rest on
significantly— a round stone table. It has found
a permanent base.

As Aniela Jaffe observes later in this book,
roundness (the mandala motif) generally sym-
bolizes a natural wholeness, whereas a quadr-
angular formation represents the realization of
this in consciousness. In the dream the square
disk and the round table meet, and thus a con-
scious realization of the center is at hand. The
round table, incidentally, is a well-known sym-
bol of wholeness and plays a i-ole in mythology
— for instance, King Arthur's round table,
which itself is an image derived from the table
of the Last Supper.

In fact, whenever a human being genuinely
turns to the inner world and tries to know him-
self-- not by ruminating about his subjective
thoughts and feelings, but by following the ex-
pressions of his own objective nature such as
dreams and genuine fantasies then sooner or
later the Self emerges. The ego will then find
an inner power that contains all the possibilities
of renewal.

In the paintings, left, of the dream
quoted on this page (painted by the
dreamer), the mandala motif appears
as a quadrangle rather than a circle
Usually quadrangular forms symbolize
conscious realization of inner
wholeness; the wholeness itself is
most often represented in circular
forms, such as the round table that
also appears in the dream. Right,
the legendary Round Table of King
Arthur (from a 1 5th-century
manuscript), at which the Holy
Grail appeared in a vision and
started the knights on the famous
quest. The Grail itself symbolizes
the inner wholeness for which men
have always been searching.

But there is a great difficulty that I have
mentioned only indirectly up till now. This is
that every personification of the unconscious
the shadow, the anima, the animus, and the Self
-has both a light and a dark aspect. We saw
before that the shadow may be base or evil, an
instinctive drive that one ought to overcome.
It may, however, be an impulse toward growth
that one should cultivate and follow. In the
same way the anima and animus have dual
aspects: They can bringlife-givingdevelopment
and creativeness to the personality, or they can
cause petrification and physical death. And
even the Self, the all-embracing symbol of the
unconscious, has an ambivalent effect, as for in-
stance in the Eskimo tale (page 196), when
the '‘little woman'' offered to save the heroine
from the Moon Spirit but actually turned her
into a spider.

The dark side of the Self is the most dan-
gerous thing of all, precisely because the Self
is the greatest power in the psyche. It can
cause people to "‘spin'' megalomaniac or other
delusory fantasies that catch them up and
“possess” them. A person in this state thinks
with mounting excitement that he has grasped
and solved the great cosmic riddles; he there-
fore loses all touch with human reality. A re-
liable symptom of this condition is the loss of
one's sense of humor and of human contacts.

Thus the emerging of the Self may bring
great danger to a man's conscious ego. The
double aspect of the Self is beautifully illustra-
ted by this old Iranian fairy tale, called “The
Secret of the Bath Badgerd

The great and noble Prince Hatim Tai receives
orders from his king to investigate the mysterious
Bath Badgerd [castle of nonexistence). When he
approaches it, having gone through many dan-
gerous adventures, he hears that nobody ever re-
turned from it, hut he insists on going on. He is
received at a round building by a barber with a
mirror who leads him into the bath, but as soon
as the prince enters the water, a thunderous noise
breaks out, it gets completely dark, the barber
disappears, and slowly the water begins to rise.

Hatim swims desperately round until the water
finally reaches the top of the round cupola, which
forms the roof of the bath. Now he fears he is
lost, but he says a prayer and grabs the center-
stone of the cupola. Again a thunderous noise,
everything changes, and Hatim stands alone in a
desert.

After long and painful wandering, he comes to
a beautiful garden in the middle of which is a
circle of stone statues. In the center of the statues,
he sees a parrot in its cage, and a voice from above
says to him: “Oh, hero, you probably will not
escape alive from this bath. Once Gayomart [the
First Man] found an enormous diamond that
shone more brightly than sun and moon. He de-
cided to hide it where no one can find it, and
therefore he built this magical bath in order to

protect it. The parrot that you see here forms
part of the magic. At its feet lie a golden bow and
arrow on a golden chain, and with them you
may try three times to shoot the parrot. If you
hit him the curse will be lifted; if not, you will
be petrified, as were all these other people."

Hatim tries once, and fails. His legs turn to
stone. He fails once more and is petrified up to
his chest. The third time he just shuts his eyes,
exclaiming “God is great," shoots blindly, and
this time hits the parrot. An outbreak of thun-
der, clouds of dust. When all this has subsided, in
place of the parrot is an enormous, beautiful dia-
mond, and all the statues have come to life again.
The people thank him for their redemption.

The reader will recognize the symbols of the
Self in this story the First Man Gayomart, the
round mandala-shaped building, the center-
stone, and the diamond. But this diamond is
surrounded by danger. The demonic parrot
signifies the evil spirit of imitation that makes
one miss the target and petrify psychologically.
As I pointed out earlier, the process of indivi-
duation excludes any parrot-like imitation of
others. Time and again in all countries people
have tried to copy in “outer” or ritualistic be-
havior the original religious experience of their
great religious teachers — Christ or Buddha or
some other master and have therefore become
“petrified." To follow in the steps of a great
spiritual leader does not mean that one should

copy and act out the pattern of the indiv idua-
tion process made by his life. It means that we
should try with a sincerity and devotion equal
to his to live our own lives.

The barber with the mirror, who vanishes,
symbolizes the gift of reflection that Hatim
loses when he wants it most; the rising waters
represent the risk that one may drown in the
unconscious and get lost in one’s own emotions.
In order to understand the symbolic indications
of the unconscious, one must be careful not to
get outside oneself or “beside oneself," but to
stay emotionally within oneself. Indeed, it is
vitally important that the ego should continue
to function in normal ways. Only if I remain
an ordinary human being, conscious of my in-
completeness, can I become receptive to the
significant contents and processes of the uncon-
scious. But how can a human being stand the
tension of feeling himself at one with the whole
universe, while at the same time he is only a
miserable earthly human creature? If, on the
one hand, I despise myself as merely a statistical
cipher, my life has no meaning and is not worth
living. But if, on the other hand, I feel myself
to be part of something much greater, how am
I to keep my feet on the ground? It is very
difficult indeed to keep these inner opposites
united within oneself without toppling over into
one or the other extreme.

Far left, the torrential waters
of the river Heraclitos overwhelm
a Greek temple, in a painting by
the modern French artist Andre
Masson. The painting can be seen
as an allegory of the results of
imbalance: Greek overemphasis on
logic and reason (the temple)
leading to a destructive eruption
of instinctual forces Left, a
more direct allegory, from a
1 bth-century illustration to the
French allegorical poem Le Roman
de la Rose, the figure of Logic (on
the right) is thrown into confusion
when confronted by Nature.

Right, the repentant St Mary
Magdalen gazes into a mirror (in
a painting by the 1 7th century
French artist Georges de la Tour).
Here, as in the tale of the Bath
Badgerd, the mirror symbolizes the
much- needed faculty of true,
inward- looking "reflection."

The social aspect of the Self

Today the enormous growth of population,
especially obvious in large cities, inevitably has
a depressing effect on us. We think, “Oh, well,
I am only so-and-so living at such-and-such an
address, like thousands of other people. If a
few of them get killed, what difference can it
make? There are far too many people in any
case.' 1 And when we read in the paper about the
deaths of innumerable unknown people who
personally mean nothing to us, the feeling that
our lives count for nothing is further increased.
This is the moment when attention to the un-
conscious brings the greatest help, for dreams
show the dreamer how each detail of his life is
interwoven with the most significant realities.

What we all know theoretically — that every
thing depends on the individual — becomes
through dreams a palpable fact that everyone
can experience for himself. Sometimes we have
a strong feeling that the Great Man wants
something from us and has set us very special
tasks. Our response to this experience can help
us to acquire the strength to swim against the
stream of collective prejudice by taking our
own soul seriously into account.

Naturally this is not always an agreeable
task. For instance, you want to make a trip with

friends next Sunday; then a dream forbids it
and demands that you do some creative work
instead. If you listen to your unconscious and
obey it, you must expect constant interference
with your conscious plans. Your will is crossed
by other intentions — intentions that you must
submit to, or at any rate must seriously con-
sider. This is partly why the obligation attached
to the process of individuation is often felt to be
a burden rather than an immediate blessing.

St. Christopher, the patron of all travelers,
is a fitting symbol for this experience. According
to the legend, he felt an arrogant pride in his
tremendous physical strength, and was willing
to serve only the strongest. First he served a
king; but when he saw that the king feared
the devil, he left him and became the devil’s
servant. Then one day he discovered that the
devil feared the crucifix, and so he decided to
serve Christ if he could find him. He followed
the advice of a priest who told him to wait for
Christ at a ford. In the years that passed he
carried many people across the river. But once,
on a dark, stormy night, a small child called
out that he wanted to be carried over the river.
With the greatest ease, St. Christopher lifted
the child on to his shoulders, but he walked

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The achievement of psychological
maturity is an individual task —
and so is increasingly difficult
today when man's individuality is
threatened by widespread conformity.
Far left, a British housing development
with its stereotyped dwellings;
left, a Swiss athletics display
provides an image of mass
regimentation.

more slowly with every step, for his burden be-
came heavier and heavier. When he arrived in
midstream, he felt “as if he carried the whole
universe/’ He realized then that he had taken
Christ upon his shoulders — and Christ gave
him remission of his sins and eternal life.

This miraculous child is a symbol of the Self
that literally “depresses” the ordinary human
being, even though it is the only thing that can
redeem him. In many works of art the Christ
child is depicted as, or with, the sphere of the
world, a motif that clearly denotes the Self, for
a child and a sphere are both universal symbols
of totality.

When a person tries to obey the unconscious,
he will often, as we have seen, be unable to do
just as he pleases. But equally he will often be
unable to do what other people want him to
do. It often happens, for instance, that he must
separate from his group— from his family, his
partner, or other personal connections — in
order to find himself. That is why it is sometimes
said that attending to the unconscious makes
people antisocial and egocentric. As a rule this
is not true, for there is a little-known factor that
enters into this attitude: the collective (or, we
could even say, social) aspect of the Self.

Above, a page from William Blake’s
Songs of Innocence and Experience,
in which the poems reveal Blake's
concept of the "divine child" — a
well-known symbol of the Self.
Right, a 1 6th-century painting of
St. Christopher carrying Christ
as a divine child (who is encircled
by a world sphere — a mandala and
a symbol of the Self) . This burden
symbolizes the "weight" of the
task of individuation — just as St.
Christopher's role as the patron
of travelers (far right, a St.
Christopher medallion on a car's
ignition key) reflects his link
with man's need to travel the path
to psychological wholeness.

From a practical angle this factor reveals
itself in that an individual who follows his
dreams for a considerable time will find that
they are often concerned with his relationships
with other people. His dreams may warn him
against trusting a certain person too much, or
he may dream about a favorable and agreeable
meeting with someone whom he may previously
have never consciously noticed. If a dream does
pick up the image of another person for us in
some such fashion, there are two possible inter-
pretations. First, the figure may be a projection,
which means that the dream-image of this per-
son is a symbol for an inner aspect of the
dreamer himself. One dreams, for instance, of
a dishonest neighbor, but the neighbor is used
by the dream as a picture of one's own dis-
honesty. It is the task of dream interpretation
to find out in which special areas one's own
dishonesty comes into play. (This is called
dream interpretation on the subjective level.)

But it also happens at times that dreams
genuinely tell us something about other people.
In this way, the unconscious plays a role that is
far from being fully understood. Like all the
higher forms of life, man is in tune with the
living beings around him to a remarkable de-
gree. He perceives their sufferings and prob-
lems, their positive and negative attributes and
values, instinctively quite independently of
his conscious thoughts about other people.

Our dream life allows us to have a look at
these subliminal perceptions and shows us that
they have an effect upon us. After having an
agreeable dream about somebody, even with-
out interpreting the dream, I shall involuntarily
look at that person with more interest. The
dream image may have deluded me, because
of my projections; or it may have given me
objective information. To find out which is the

The conscious realization of the
Self can create a bond among people
that ignores more obvious, natural
groups like the family (above left).

A mental kinship on a conscious
level can often be the nucleus of
cultural development: above, the
1 8th -century French encyclopedists
(including Voltaire, with raised
hand); below, a painting by Max Ernst
of the early 20th-century 'Dadaist''
artists; and research physicists
at Britain's Wills Laboratory.

220

The psychological balance and unity
that man needs today have been
symbolized in many modern dreams
by the union of the French girl
and the Japanese man in the widely
popular French film Hiroshima Mon
Amour (1 959), above. And in the
same dreams, the opposite extreme
from wholeness (i.e. complete
psychological dissociation, or
madness) has been symbolized by
a related 20th-century image —
a nuclear explosion (right).

correct interpretation requires an honest, atten-
tive attitude and careful thought. But, as is the
case with all inner processes, it is ultimately the
Sell that orders and regulates one's human rela-
tionships, so long as the conscious ego takes
the trouble to detect the delusive projections
and deals with these inside himself instead of
outside. It is in this way that spiritually attuned
and similarly oriented people find their way to
one another, to create a group that cuts across
all the usual social and organizational affilia-
tions of people. Such a group is not in conflict
with others; it is merely different and inde-
pendent. The consciously realized process of
individuation thus changes a person's relation-
ships. The familiar bonds such as kinship or
common interests are replaced by a different
type of unity — a bond through the Self.

All activities and obligations that belong ex-
clusively to the outer world do definite harm to
the secret activities of the unconscious. Through
these unconscious ties those who belong to-
gether come together. That is one reason why
attempts to influence people by advertisements
and political propaganda are destructive, even
when inspired by idealistic motives.

This raises the important question ofwhether
the unconscious part of the human psyche can

be influenced at all. Practical experience and
accurate observation show that one cannot in-
fluence one's own dreams. There are people, it
is true, who assert that they can influence them.
But if you look into their dream material, you
find that they do only what I do with my dis-
obedient dog; I order him to do those things 1
notice he wants to do anyhow, so that I can
preserve my illusion of authority. Only a long
process of' interpreting one's dreams and con-
fronting oneself with what they have to say can
gradually transform the unconscious. And con-
scious attitudes also must change in this process.

If a man who wants to influence public
opinion misuses symbols for this purpose, they
will naturally impress the masses in so far as
they are true symbols, but whether or not the
mass unconscious will be emotionally gripped
by them is something that cannot be calculated
in advance, something that remains completely
irrational. No music publisher, for instance, can
tell in advance whether a song will become a
hit or not, even though it may draw on popular
images and melodies. No deliberate attempts to
influence the unconscious have yet produced
any significant results, and it seems that the
mass unconscious preserves its autonomy just
as much as the individual unconscious.

22 I

At times, in order to express its purposes, the
unconscious may use a motif from our external
world and thus may seem to have been influ-
enced by it. For instance, I have come across
many dreams of modern people that have to
do with Berlin. In these dreams Berlin stands
as a symbol of the psychic weak spot — the
place of danger — and for this reason is the
place where the Self is apt to appear. It is the
point where the dreamer is torn by conflict and
where he might, therefore, be able to unite the
inner opposites. I have also encountered an
extraordinary number ofdream reactions to the
film Hiroshima Mon Amour. In most of these
dreams the idea was expressed that either the
two lovers in the film must unite (which sym-
bolizes the union of inner opposites) or there
would be an atomic explosion (a symbol of com-
plete dissociation, equivalent to madness).

Only when the manipulators of public
opinion add commercial pressure or acts of
violence to their activities do they seem to
achieve a temporary success. But in fact this
merely causes a repression of the genuine un-
conscious reactions. And mass repression leads
to the same result as individual repression ; that
is, to neurotic dissociation and psychological
illness. All such attempts to repress the reactions
of the unconscious must fail in the long run, for
they are basically opposed to our instincts.

We know from studying the social behavior
of the higher animals that small groups (from
approximately 10 to 50 individuals) create the

As in the dream quoted on p. 223,
positive anima figures often assist
and guide men. Top of page, from a
10th-century psalter, David inspired
by the muse. Above, a goddess
saves a shipwrecked sailor (in a 1 6th-
century painting) Right, on an early
20th-century postcard from Monte
Carlo, gamblers' “Lady Luck" — also
a helpful anima.

Right, Liberty leading the French
revolutionaries (in a painting by
Delacroix) images the anima's
function of assisting individuation
by liberating unconscious contents.
Far right, in a scene from the 1 925
fantasy film Metropolis, a woman
urges robot- like workers to find
spiritual "liberation."

222

best possible living conditions for the single
animal as well as for the group, and man seems
to be no exception in this respect. His physical
well-being, his spiritual psychic health, and,
beyond the animal realm, his cultural efficiency
seem to flourish best in such a social function.
As far as we at present understand the process
of individuation, the Self apparently tends to
produce such small groups by creating at the
same time sharply defined ties of feeling be-
tween certain individuals and feelings of re-
latedness to all people. Only if these connections
are created by the Self can one feel any assur-
ance that envy, jealousy, fighting, and all man-
ner of negative projections will not break up the
group. Thus an unconditional devotion to one's
own process of individuation also brings about
the best possible adaptation.

This does not mean, of course, that there
will not be collisions of opinion and conflicting
obligations, or disagreement about the 'Tight"
way, in the face of which one must constantly
withdraw and listen to one's inner voice in
order to find the individual standpoint that the
Self intends one to have.

Fanatical political activity (but not the per-
formance of essential duties) seems somehow
incompatible with individuation. A man who
devoted himself entirely to freeing his country
from foreign occupation had this dream:

With some of my compatriots I go up a stair-
way to the attic of a museum, where there is a

hall painted black and looking like a cabin on a
ship. A distinguished-looking middle-aged lady
opens the door; her name is X, daughter of X.
[X was a famous national hero of the dreamer's
country who attempted some centuries ago to free
it. He might be compared to Joan of Arc or Wil-
liam Tell. In reality X had no children.] In the
hall we see the portraits of two aristocratic ladies
dressed in flowery brocaded garments. While Miss
X is explaining these pictures to us, they sud-
denly come to life; first the eyes begin to live, and
then the chest seems to breathe. People are sur-
prised and go to a lecture room where Miss X
will speak to them about the phenomenon. She
says that through her intuition and feeling these
portraits came alive; but some of the people are
indignant and say that Miss X is mad; some even
leave the lecture room.

The important feature of this dream is that
the anima figure, Miss X, is purely a creation
of the dream. She has, however, the name of a
famous national hero-liberator (as if she were,
for instance, Wilhclmina Tell, the daughter of
William Tell). By the implications contained in
the name, the unconscious is pointing to the
fact that today the dreamer should not try, as
X did long ago, to free his country in an outer
way. Now, the dream says, liberation is accom-
plished by the anima (by the dreamer’s soul),
who accomplishes it by bringing the images of
the unconscious to life.

That the hall in the attic of the museum
looks partly like a ship’s cabin painted black is
very meaningful. The black color hints at dark-
ness, night, a turning inward, and if the hall is

a cabin, then the museum is somehow also a
ship. This suggests that when the mainland of
collective consciousness becomes flooded by un-
consciousness and barbarism, this museum-ship,
filled with living images, may turn into a saving
ark that will carry those who enter it to another
spiritual shore. Portraits hanging in a museum
are usually the dead remains of the past, and
often the images of the unconscious are re-
garded in the same way until we discover that
they are alive and meaningful. When the anima
(who appears here in her rightful role of soul-
guide) contemplates the images with intuition
and feeling, they begin to live.

The indignant people in the dream represent
the side of the dreamer that is influenced by
collective opinion — something in him that dis-
trusts and rejects the bringing to life of psychic
images. They personify a resistance to the un-
conscious that might express itself something
like this: “But what if they begin dropping
atom bombs on us? Psychological insight won’t
be much help then!”

This resistant side is unable to free itself from
statistical thinking and from extraverted
rational prejudices. The dream, however, points
out that in our time genuine liberation can start
only with a psychological transformation. To
what end does one liberate one’s country if
afterward there is no meaningful goal of life —
no .goal for which it is worthwhile to be free?
If man no longer finds any meaning in his life,
it makes no difference whether he wastes away
under a Communist or a capitalist regime. Only
if he can use his freedom to create something
meaningful is it relevant that he should be free.
That is why finding the inner meaning of life
is more important to the individual than any-
thing else, and why the process of individuation
must be given priority.

Attempts to influence public opinion by
means of newspapers, radio, television, and
advertising are based on two factors. On the
one hand, they rely on sampling techniques that
reveal the trend of “opinion” or “wants” that
is, of collective attitudes. On the other, they
express prejudices, projections, and uncon-
scious complexes (mainly the power complex)

of those who manipulate public opinion. But
statistics do no justice to the individual.
Although the average size of stones in a heap
may be five centimeters, one will find very few
stones of exactly this size in the heap.

That the second factor cannot create any-
thing positive is clear from the start. But if a
single individual devotes himself to individua-
tion, he frequently has a positive contagious
effect on the people around him. It is as if a
spark leaps from one to another. And this usu-
ally occurs when one has no intention of influ-
encing others and often when one uses no
words. It is onto this inner path that Miss X
tried to lead the dreamer.

Nearly all religious systems on our planet
contain images that symbolize the process of
individuation, or at least some stages of it. In
Christian countries the Self is projected, as I
said before, onto the second Adam: Christ. In
the East the relevant figures are those of
Krishna and Buddha.

For people who are contained in a religion
(that is, who still really believe in its content
and teachings), the psychological regulation of
their lives is effected by religious symbols, and
even their dreams often revolve around them.
When the late Pope Pius XII issued the decla-
ration of the Assumption of Mary, a Catholic
woman dreamed, for instance, that she was a
Catholic priestess. Her unconscious seemed to
extend the dogma in this way : “If Mary is now
almost a goddess, she should have priestesses.”
Another Catholic woman, who had resistances
to some of the minor and outer aspects of her
creed, dreamed that the church of her home
city had been pulled down and rebuilt, but that
the tabernacle with the consecrated host and
the statue of the Virgin Mary were to be trans-
ferred from the old to the new church. The
dream showed her that some of the man-made
aspects of her religion needed renewal, but that
its basic symbols — God’s having become Man,
and the Great Mother, the Virgin Mary —
would survive the change.

Such dreams demonstrate the living interest
that the unconscious takes in the conscious re-
ligious representations of an individual. This

224

raises the question whether it is possible to de-
tect a general trend in all the religious dreams
of contemporary people. In the manifestations
of the unconscious found in our modern Chris-
tian culture, whether Protestant or Catholic,
Dr. Jung often observed that there is an un-
conscious tendency at work to round off our
trinitarian formula of the Godhead with a
fourth element, which tends to be feminine,
dark, and even evil. Actually this fourth ele-
ment has always existed in the realm of our
religious representations, but it was separated
from the image of God and became his coun-
terpart, in the form of matter itself (or the lord
of matter — i.e. the devil). Now the unconscious
seems to want to reunite these extremes, the
light having become too bright and the dark-
ness too somber. Naturally it is the central sym-
bol of religion, the image of the Godhead, that
is most exposed to unconscious tendencies to-
ward transformation.

A Tibetan abbot once told Dr. Jung that the
most impressive mandalas in Tibet are built up
by imagination, or directed fantasy, when the
psychological balance of the group is disturbed
or when a particular thought cannot be rend-
ered because it is not yet contained In the sac-
red doctrine and must therefore be searched
for. In these remarks, two equally important
basic aspects of mandala symbolism emerge.
The mandala serves a conservative purpose —
namely, to restore a previously existing order.

But it also serves the creative purpose of giving
expression and form to something that does
not yet exist, something new and unique. The
second aspect is perhaps even more important
than the first, but docs not contradict it. For,
in most cases, what restores the old order simul-
taneously involves some element of new crea-
tion. In the new order the older pattern returns
on a higher level. The process is that of the
ascending spiral, which grows upward while
simultaneously returning again and again to the
same point.

A painting by a simple woman who was
brought up in Protestant surroundings shows a
mandala in the form of a spiral. In a dream
this woman received an order to paint the God-
head. Later (also in a dream) she saw it in a
book. Of God himself she saw only his wafting
cloak, the drapery of which made a beautiful
display of light and shadow. This contrasted
impressively with the stability of the spiral in
the deep blue sky. Fascinated by the cloak and
the .spiral, the dreamer did not look closely at
the other figure on the rocks. When she awoke
and thought about who these divine figures
were, she suddenly realized that it was “God
himself. ” This gave her a frightful shock, which
she felt for a long time.

Usually the Holy Ghost is represented in
Christian art by a fiery wheel or a dove, but
here it has appeared as a spiral. This is a new
thought, “not yet contained in the doctrine,”

This 1 5th-century statue of Mary
contains within it images of both
God and Christ— a clear expression
of the fact that the Virgin Mary
can be said to be a representation
of the "Great Mother" archetype.

225

A miniature from the 1 5th-century
French Book of Hours, showing Mary
with the Holy Trinity. The Catholic
Church's dogma of the Assumption
of the Virgin — in which Mary, as
domina rerum. Queen of Nature, was
declared to have entered heaven
with soul and body reunited— can
be said to have made the Trinity
fourfold, corresponding with the
basic archetype of completeness.

which has spontaneously arisen from the un-
conscious. That the Holy Ghost is the power
that works for the further development of our
religious understanding is not a new idea, of
course, but its symbolic representation in the
form of a spiral is new.

The same woman then painted a second
picture, also inspired by a dream, showing the
dreamer with her positive animus standing
above Jerusalem when the wing of Satan de-
scends to darken the city. The satanic wing
strongly reminded her of the wafting cloak of
God in the first painting, but in the former
dream the spectator is high up, somewhere in
heaven, and sees in front of her a terrific split
between the rocks. The movement in the cloak
of God is an attempt to reach Christ, the figure
on the right, but it does not quite succeed. In
the second painting, the same thing is seen from
below r from a human angle. Looking at it
from a higher angle, what is moving and
spreading is a part of God ; above that rises the
spiral as a symbol of possible further develop-
ment. But seen from the basis of our human
reality, this same thing in the air is the dark,
uncanny wing of the devil.

In the dreamer's life these two pictures be-
came real in a way that does not concern us
here, but it is obvious that they also contain a
collective meaning that reaches beyond the per-
sonal. They may prophesy the descent of a
divine darkness upon the Christian hemisphere,
a darkness that points, however, toward the
possibility of further evolution. Since the axis
of the spiral does not move upward but into
the background of the picture, the further evo-
lution will lead neither to greater spiritual
height nor down into the realm of matter, but
to another dimension, probably into the back-
ground of these divine figures. And that means
into the unconscious.

When religious symbols that are partly dif-
ferent from those we know emerge from the
unconscious of an individual, it is often feared
that these will wrongfully alter or diminish the
officially recognized religious symbols. This fear
even causes many people to reject analytical
psychology and the entire unconscious.

226

II' I look at such a resistance from a psy-
chological point of view, I should have to com-
ment that as far as religion is concerned,
human beings can be divided into three types.
First, there are those who still genuinely believe
their religious doctrines, whatever they may be.
For these people, the symbols and doctrines
‘"click" so satisfyingly with what they feel deep
inside themselves that serious doubts have no
chance to sneak in. This happens when the
views of consciousness and the unconscious
background are in relative harmony. People of
this sort can afford to look at new psycho-
logical discoveries and facts without prejudice
and need not fear that they may be caused to
lose their faith. Even if their dreams should
bring up some relatively unorthodox details,
these can be integrated into their general view.

The second type consists of those people who
have completely lost their faith and have re-
placed it with purely conscious, rational
opinions. For these people, depth psychology
simply means an introduction into newly dis-
covered areas of the psyche, and it should cause
no trouble when they embark on the new ad-
venture and investigate their dreams to test the
truth of them.

Then there is a third group of people who in
one part of themselves (probably the head) no
longer believe in their religious traditions.

w hereas in some other part they still do believe.
The French philosopher Voltaire is an illustra-
tion of this. He violently attacked the Catholic
Church with rational argument (ecrasez /Vw-
fame), but on his deathbed, according to some
reports, he begged for extreme unction.
Whether this is true or not, his head was cer-
tainly unreligious, whereas his feelings and
emotions seem still to have been orthodox. Such
people remind one of a person getting stuck
in the automatic doors of a bus; he can neither
get out into free space nor re-enter the bus. Of
course the dreams of such persons could prob-
ably help them out of their dilemma, but such
people frequently have trouble turning toward
the unconscious because they themselves do not
know what they think and want. To take the
unconscious seriously is ultimately a matter of
personal courage and integrity.

The complicated situation of those w ho are
caught in a no-man's-land between the two
states of mind is partly created by the fact that
all official religious doctrines actually belong to
the collective consciousness (what Freud called
the super-ego) ; but once, long ago, they sprang
from the unconscious. This is a point that many
historians of religion and theologians challenge.
They choose to assume that there was once
some sort of "revelation." I have searched for
many years for concrete evidence for the Jun-

Paintings of the dreams discussed
on pp 225 6: Left, the spiral (a
form of mandala) represents the
Holy Ghost; right, the dark wing
of Satan, from the second dream
Neither motif would be a familiar
religious symbol to most people
(nor were they to the dreamer):
Each emerged spontaneously
from the unconscious.

gian hypothesis about this problem ; but it has
been difficult to find because most rituals are
so old that one cannot trace their origin. The
following example, however, seems to me to
offer a most important clue:

Black Elk, a medicine man of the Oglala
Sioux, who died not long ago, tells us in his
autobiography Black Elk Speaks that, when he
was nine years old, he became seriously ill and
during a sort of coma had a tremendous vision.
He saw four groups of beautiful horses coming
from the four corners of the world, and then,
seated within a cloud, he saw the Six Grand-
fathers, the ancestral spirits of his tribe, “the
grandfathers of the whole world.” They gave
him six healing symbols for his people and
showed him new ways of life. But when he was
16 years old, he suddenly developed a terrible
phobia whenever a thunder storm was ap-
proaching, because he heard “thunder beings”
calling to him “to make haste.” It reminded
him of the thundering noise made by the ap-
proaching horses in his vision. An old medicine
man explained to him that his fear came from
the fact that he was keeping his vision to him-
self, and said that he must tell it to his tribe.
He did so, and later he and his people acted
out the vision in a ritual, using real horses.
Not merely Black Elk himself, but many other
members of his tribe felt infinitely better after
this play. Some were even cured of their dis-
eases. Black Elk said: “Even the horses seemed
to be healthier and happier after the dance.”

The ritual was not repeated because the tribe
was destroyed soon afterward. But here is a
different case in which a ritual still survives.
Several Eskimo tribes living near the Colville
River in Alaska explain the origin of their eagle
festival in the following way:

A young hunter shot dead a very unusual eagle
and was so impressed by the beauty of the dead
bird that he stuffed and made a fetish of him,
honoring him by sacrifices. One day, when the
hunter had traveled far inland during his hunt-
ing, two animal-men suddenly appeared in the
role of messengers and led him to the land of the
eagles. There he heard a dark drumming noise,

<2 -8

and the messengers explained that this was the
heartbeat of the dead eagle’s mother. Then the
eagle spirit appeared to the hunter as a woman
clothed in black. She asked him to initiate an
eagle festival among his people to honor her dead
son. After the eagle people had shown him how
to do this, he suddenly found himself, exhausted,
back in the place where he had met the messen-
gers. Returning home, he taught his people how
to perform the great eagle festival ~ as they have
done faithfully ever since.

From such examples we see how a ritual or
religious custom can spring directly from an
unconscious revelation experienced by a single
individual. Out of such beginnings, people liv-
ing in cultural groups develop their various re-
ligious activities with their enormous influence
on the entire life of the society. During a long
process of evolution the original material is
shaped and reshaped by words and actions, is
beautified, and acquires increasingly definite
forms. This crystallizing process, however, has
a great disadvantage. More and more people
have no personal knowledge of the original ex-
perience and can only believe what their elders
and teachers tell them about it. They no longer
know that such happenings are real, and they
are of course ignorant about how one feels dur-
ing the experience.

In their present forms, worked over and ex-
ceedingly aged, such religious traditions often
resist further creative alterations by the uncon-
scious. Theologians sometimes even defend
these “true” religious symbols and symbolic
doctrines against the discovery of a religious
function in the unconscious psyche, forgetting
that the values they fight for owe their exist-
ence to that very same function. Without a
human psyche to receive divine inspirations
and utter them in words or shape them in art,
no religious symbol has ever come into the
reality of our human life. (We need only think
of the prophets and the evangelists.)

If someone objects that there is a religious
reality in itself, independent of the human
psyche, I can only answer such a person with
this question: “Who says this, if not a human
psyche?” No matter what we assert, we can

never get away from the existence of the psyche
— for we are contained within it, and it is the
only means by which we can grasp reality.

Thus the modern discovery of the uncon-
scious shuts one door forever. It definitely ex-
cludes the illusory idea, so favored by some
individuals, that a man can know spiritual
reality in itself. In modern physics, too, a door
has been closed by Heisenberg’s ‘'principle of
indeterminacy,” shutting out the delusion that
we can comprehend an absolute physical re-
ality. The discovery of the unconscious, how-
ever, compensates for the loss of these beloved
illusions by opening before us an immense and
unexplored new field of realizations, within
which objective scientific investigation com-
bines in a strange new way with personal
ethical adventure.

But, as I said at the outset, it is practically
impossible to impart the whole reality of one’s
experience in the new field. Much is unique
and can be only partially communicated by
language. Here, too, a door is shut against the

illusion that one can completely understand
another person and tell him what is right for
him. Once again, however, one can find a com-
pensation for this in the new realm of experi-
ence by the discovery of the social function of
the Self, which works in a hidden way to
unite separate individuals who belong together.

Intellectual chit-chat is thus replaced by
meaningful events that occur in the reality of
the psyche. Hence, for the individual to enter
seriously into the process of individuation in the
way that has been outlined means a completely
new and different orientation toward life. For
scientists it also means a new and different
scientific approach to outer facts. How this will
work out in the field of human knowledge and
in the social life of human beings cannot be
predicted. But to me it seems certain that
Jung’s discovery of the process of individuation
is a fact that future generations will have to
take into account if they want to avoid drifting
into a stagnant or even regressive outlook.

This painting (by Erhard Jacoby)
illustrates the fact that each of
us, perceiving the world through
an individual psyche, perceives it
in a slightly different way from
others. The man, woman, and child
are looking at the same scene; but,
for each, different details become
clear or obscured. Only by means of
our conscious perception does the
world exist "outside": We are
surrounded by something completely
unknown and unknowable (here
represented by the painting's
gray background).

229

4 Symbolism in the visual arts

Aniela Jaffe

Variation within a Sphere no. 10: The Sun, by Richard Lippold

Symbolism in the visual arts

Sacred symbols — the stone and the animal

The history of symbolism shows that everything
can assume symbolic significance: natural
objects (like stones, plants, animals, men, moun-
tains and valleys, sun and moon, wind, water,
and fire), or man-made things (like houses,
boats, or cars) , or even abstract forms (like num-
bers, or the triangle, the square, and the circle).
In fact, the whole cosmos is a potential symbol.

Man, with his symbol-making propensity,
unconsciously transforms objects or forms into
symbols (thereby endowing them with great psy-
chological importance) and expresses them in
both his religion and his visual art. The inter-
twined history of religion and art, reaching back
to prehistoric times, is the record that our ances-
tors have left of the symbols that were mean-
ingful and moving to them. Even today, as
modern painting and sculpture show, the inter-
play of religion and art is still alive.

For the first part of my discussion of sym-
bolism in the visual arts, I intend to examine
some of the specific motifs that have been uni-
versally sacred or mysterious to man. Then, for
the remainder of the chapter, I wish to discuss
the phenomenon of 20th-century art, not in
terms of its use of symbols, but in terms of its
significance as a symbol itself — a symbolic
expression of the psychological condition of the
modern world.

In the following pages, I have chosen three
recurring motifs with which to illustrate the
presence and nature of symbolism in the art of
many different periods. These are the symbols
of the stone, the animal, and the circle — each
of which has had enduring psychological signi-
ficance from the earliest expressions of human
consciousness to the most sophisticated forms of
20th-century art.

We know that even unhewn stones had a
highly symbolic meaning for ancient and primi-
tive societies. Rough, natural stones were often
believed to be the dwelling places of spirits or
gods, and were used in primitive cultures as

232

tombstones, boundary stones, or objects of reli-
gious veneration. Their use may be regarded as
a primeval form of sculpture — a first attempt to
invest the stone with more expressive power
than chance and nature could give it.

The Old Testament story of Jacob’s dream is
a typical example of how, thousands of years
ago, man felt that a living god or a divine spirit
was embodied in the stone and how the stone
became a symbol:

And Jacob . . . went toward Haran. And he
lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all
night, because the sun was set; and he took of
the stones of the place, and put them for his pil-
lows and lay down in that place to sleep. And he
dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the
earth, and the top of it reached to heaven, and
behold the angels of God ascending and descend-
ing on it. And, behold, the Lord stood above it,
and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy
father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon
thou best, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed.

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said,
Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it
not. And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful
is this place! this is none other but the house of
God, and this is the gate of heaven. And Jacob
rose up early in the morning and took the stone

that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a
pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he
called the name of that place Beth-el.

For Jacob, the stone was an integral part of the
revelation. It was the mediator between himself
and God.

In many primitive stone-sanctuaries, the deity
is represented not by a single stone but by a
great many unhewn stones, arranged in distinct
patterns. (The geometrical stone alignments in
Brittany and the stone circle at Stonehenge are
famous examples.) Arrangements of rough
natural stones also play a considerable part in
the highly civilized rock gardens of Zen
Buddhism. Their arrangement is not geometri-
cal but seems to have come about by pure
chance. In fact, however, it is the expression of
a most refined spirituality.

Very early in history, men began trying to
express what they felt to be the soul or spirit of
a rock by working it into a recognizable form.
In many cases, the form was a more or less de-
finite approximation to the human figure — for
instance, the ancient menhirs with their crude
outlines of faces, or the herms that developed
out of boundary stones in ancient Greece, or the

Above left, the stone alignments
at Carnac in Brittany, dating from
c. 2000 b.c. — crude stones set
upright in rows that are thought to
have been used in sacred rituals
and religious processions. Left,
rough stones resting on raked sand
in a Zen Buddhist rock garden (in
the Ryoanji temple, Japan). Though
apparently haphazard, the stones'
arrangement in fact expresses a
highly refined spirituality.

Right, a prehistoric menhir — a
rock that has been slightly carved
into a female form (probably a
mother goddess) . Far right, a
sculpture by Max Ernst (born
1 891 ) has also hardly altered the
natural shape of the stone.

many primitive stone idols with human features.
The animation of the stone must be explained
as the projection of a more or less distinct
content of the unconscious into the stone.

The primitive tendency to give merely a hint
of a human figure, and to retain much of the
stone’s natural form, can also be seen in
modern sculpture. Many examples show the
artists’ concern with the “self-expression” of the
stone; to use the language of myth, the stone is
allowed to “speak for itself.” This can be seen,
for instance, in the work of the Swiss sculptor
Hans Aeschbacher, the American sculptor
James Rosati, and the German-born artist Max
Ernst. In a letter from Maloja in 1935, Ernst
wrote: "Alberto [the Swiss artist Giacometti]
and I are afflicted with sculpturitis. We work
on granite boulders, large and small, from the
moraine of the Forno glacier. Wonderfully pol-
ished by time, frost, and weather, they are in
themselves fantastically beautiful. No human
hand can do that. So why not leave the spade-
work to the elements, and confine ourselves to
scratching on them the runes of our own
mystery?”

What Ernst meant by "mystery” is not ex-
plained. But later in this chapter I shall try to
show that the “mysteries” of the modern artist
are not very different from those of the old
masters who knew the “spirit of the stone.”

The emphasis on this “spirit” in much sculp-
ture is one indication of the shifting, indefinable

borderline between religion and art. Sometimes
one cannot be separated from the other. The
same ambivalence can also be seen in another
symbolic motif, as it appears in age-old works
of art: the symbol of the animal.

Animal pictures go back to the last Ice Age
(between 60,000 and 10,000 b.c.). They were
discovered on the walls of caves in France
and Spain at the end of the last century, but it
was not until early in the present century that
archaeologists began to realize their extreme
importance and to inquire into their meaning.
These inquiries revealed an infinitely remote
prehistoric culture whose existence had never
even been suspected.

Even today, a strange music seems to haunt
the caves that contain the rock engravings and
paintings. According to the German art his-
torian Herbert Kuhn, inhabitants of the
areas in Africa, Spain, France, and Scandinavia
where such paintings are found could not be
induced to go near the caves. A kind of religious
awe, or perhaps a fear of spirits hovering among
the rocks and the paintings, held them back.
Passing nomads still lay their votive offerings
before the old rock paintings in North Africa.
In the 15th century. Pope Calixtus 1 1 prohibited
religious ceremonies in the “cave with the horse-
pictures.” Which cave the pope meant is not
known, but there can be no doubt that it was a
cave of the Ice Age containing animal pictures.
All this goes to prove that the caves and rocks

234

Far left, animal paintings on cave
walls at Lascaux. The paintings
were not simply decorative; they
had a magical function. Left, a
drawing of a bison covered with
arrow and spear marks: The cave
dwellers believed that by ritually
"killing" the image, they would be
more likely to kill the animal.

Even today the destruction of an
effigy or statue is a symbolic
killing of the person depicted.

Right, a statue of Stalin destroyed
by Hungarian rebels in 1 956; far
right, rebels hang a bust of the former
Stalinist Hungarian premier
Matyas Rakosi.

with the animal paintings have always been
instinctively felt to be what they originally
were — religious places. The numen of the place
has outlived the centuries.

In a number of caves the modern visitor must
travel through low, dark, and damp passages
till he reaches the point where the great painted
“chambers 7 ’ suddenly open out. This arduous
approach may express the desire of the primi-
tive men to safeguard from common sight all
that was contained and went on in the caves,
and to protect their mystery. The sudden and
unexpected sight of the paintings in the cham-
bers, coming after the difficult and awe-inspir-
ing approach, must have made an overwhelm-
ing impression on primitive man.

The paleolithic cave paintings consist almost
entirely of figures of animals, whose movements
and postures have been observed in nature and
rendered with great artistic skill. There are,
however, many details that show that the fig-
ures were intended to be something more than
naturalistic reproductions. Kuhn writes: “The
strange thing is that a good many primitive
paintings have been used as targets. At Monte-
span there is an engraving of a horse that is
being driven into a trap; it is pitted with the
marks of missiles. A clay model of a bear in the
same cave has 42 holes.”

These pictures suggest a hunting-magic like
that still practiced today by hunting tribes in
Africa. The painted animal has the function of

a “double”; by its symbolic slaughter, the
hunters attempt to anticipate and ensure the
death of the real animal. This is a form of sym-
pathetic magic, which is based on the “reality 7 '
of a double represented in a picture: What
happens to the picture will happen to the
original. The underlying psychological fact is
a strong identification between a living being
and its image, which is considered to be the
being’s soul. (This is one reason why a great
many primitive people today will shrink from
being photographed.)

Other cave pictures must have served magic
fertility rites. They show animals at the
moment of mating; an example can be seen in
the figures of a male and female bison in the
Tuc d'Audubert cave in France. Thus the rea-
listic picture of the animals was enriched by
overtones of magic and took on a symbolic sig-
nificance. It became the image of the living
essence of the animal.

The most interesting figures in the cave
paintings are those of semihuman beings in
animal disguise, which are sometimes to be
found besides the animals. In the Trois Freres
cave in France, a man wrapped in an animal
hide is playing a primitive flute as if he meant
to put a spell on the animals. In the same cave,
there is a dancing human being, with antlers, a
horse’s head, and bear’s paws. This figure, dom-
inating a medley of several hundred animals, is
unquestionably the “Lord of the Animals.”

235

The customs and usages of some primitive
African tribes today can throw some light on
the meaning of these mysterious and doubtless
symbolic figures. In initiations, secret societies,
and even the institution of monarchy in these
tribes, animals and animal disguises often play
an important part. The king and chief are ani-
mals too — generally lions or leopards. Vestiges
of this custom may be discerned in the title of
the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie
(Lion of Judah), or the honorific name of Dr.
Hastings Banda (The Lion of Malawi).

The further back we go in time, or the more
primitive and close to nature the society is, the
more literally such titles must be taken. A pri-
mitive chief is not only disguised as the animal ;
when he appears at initiation rites in full animal
disguise, he is the animal. Still more, he is an
animal spirit, a terrifying demon who per-
forms circumcision. At such moments he incor-
porates or represents the ancestor of the tribe
and the clan, and therefore the primal god
himself. He represents, and is, the “totem"
animal. Thus we probably should not go far
wrong in seeing in the figure of the dancing
animal-man in the Trois Freres cave a kind of
chief who has been transformed by his disguise
into an animal demon.

In the course of time, the complete animal
disguise was superseded in many places by ani-
mal and demon masks. Primitive men lavished

all their artistic skill on these masks, and many
of them are still unsurpassed in the power and
intensity of their expression. They are often the
objects of the same veneration as the god or
demon himself. Animal masks play a part in the
folk artsofmanv modern countries, like Switzer-
land, or in the magnificently expressive masks
of the ancient Japanese No drama, which is
still performed in modern Japan. The symbolic
function of the mask is the same as that of the
original animal disguise. Individual human ex-
pression is submerged, but in its place the
wearer assumes the dignity and the beauty (and
also the horrifying expression) of an animal
demon. In psychological terms, the mask trans-
forms its wearer into an archetypal image.

Dancing, which was originally nothing more
than a completion of the animal disguise by
appropriate movements and gestures, was prob-
ably supplementary to the initiation or other
rites. It was, so to speak, performed by demons
in honor of a demon. In the soft clay of the Tuc
d'Audubert cave, Herbert Kuhn found foot-
prints that led around animal figures. They show
that dancing was part of even the Ice Age rites.
“Only heel prints can be seen," Kuhn writes.
“The dancers had moved like bisons. They had
danced a bison dance for the fertility and in-
crease of the animals and for their slaughter.”

In his introductory chapter, Dr. Jung has
pointed out the close relation, or even identifi-

Far left, a prehistoric painting from
Trois Freres cave includes (lower
right corner) a human figure, perhaps
a shaman, with horns and hoofs.

As examples of "animal'' dances:
left, a Burmese buffalo dance in
which masked dancers are possessed
by the buffalo spirit; right, a
Bolivian devil dance in which the
dancers wear demonic animal masks;
far right, an old southwest German
folk dance in which the dancers
are disguised as witches and
as animal -like "wild men."

236

cation, between the native and his totem animal
(or “bush-soul”). There are special ceremonies
for the establishment of this relationship, especi-
ally the initiation rites for boys. The boy enters
into possession of his “animal soul,” and at the
same time sacrifices his own “animal being” by
circumcision. This dual process admits him to
the totem clan and establishes his relationship
to his totem animal. Above all, he becomes a
man, and (in a still wider sense) a human being.

East Coast Africans described the uncircum-
cised as “animals.” They had neither received
an animal soul nor sacrificed their “animality.”
In other words, since neither the human nor the
animal aspect of an uncircumcised boy's soul
had become conscious, his animal aspect was
regarded as dominant.

The animal motif is usually symbolic of
man's primitive and instinctual nature. Even
civilized men must realize the violence of their
instinctual drives and their powerlessness in face
of the autonomous emotions erupting from the
unconscious. This is still more the case with
primitive men, whose consciousness is not highly
developed and who are still less well equipped
to weather the emotional storm. In the first
chapter of this book, when Dr. Jung is discus-
sing the ways in which man developed the
power of reflection, he takes an example of an
African who fell into a rage and killed his
beloved little son. When the man recovered

himself, he was overwhelmed with grief and re-
morse for what he had done. In this case a
negative impulse broke loose and did its deadly
work regardless of the conscious will. The ani-
mal demon is a highly expressive symbol for
such an impulse. The vividness and concrete-
ness of the image enables man to establish a
relationship with it as a representative of the
overwhelming power in himself. He fears it and
seeks to propitiate it by sacrifice and ritual.

A large number of myths are concerned with
a primal animal, which must be sacrificed in
the cause of fertility or even creation. One ex-
ample of this is the sacrifice of a bull by the
Persian sun-god Mithras, from which sprang the
earth with all wealth and fruitfulness. In the
Christian legend of St. George slaying the
dragon, the primeval rite of sacrificial slaughter
again appears.

In the religions and religious art of practi-
cally every race, animal attributes are ascribed
to the supreme gods, or the gods are repre-
sented as animals. The ancient Babylonians
translated their gods into the heavens in the
shape of the Ram, the Bull, the Crab, the Lion,
the Scorpion, the Fish, and so on — the signs of
the Zodiac. The Egyptians represented the god-
dess Hathor as cow-headed, the god Amon as
ram-headed, and Thoth as ibis-headed or in the
shape of a baboon. Ganesha, the Hindu god of
good fortune, has a human body but the head

237

of an elephant, Vishnu is a boar, Hanuman is an
ape-god, etc. (The Hindus, incidentally, do not
assign the first place in the hierarchy of being
to man: The elephant and lion stand higher.)

Greek mythology is full of animal sym-
bolism. Zeus, the father of the gods, often
approaches a girl whom he desires in the shape
of a swan, a bull, or an eagle. In Germanic
mythology, the cat is sacred to the goddess
Freya, while the boar, the raven, and the horse
are sacred to Wotan.

Even in Christianity, animal symbolism plays
a surprisingly great part. Three of the Evange-
lists have animal emblems: St. Luke has the
ox, St. Mark the lion, and St. John the eagle.
Only one, St. Matthew, is represented as a man
or as an angel. Christ himself symbolically
appears as the Lamb of God or the Fish, but he
is also the serpent exalted on the cross, the lion,
and in rarer cases the unicorn. These animal
attributes of Christ indicate that even the Son
of God (the supreme personification of man)
can no more dispense with his animal nature
than with his higher, spiritual nature. The sub-
human as well as the superhuman is felt to be-
long to the realm of the divine; the relationship
of these two aspects of man is beautifully sym-
bolized in the Christmas picture of the birth of
Christ, in a stable among animals.

The boundless profusion of animal symbolism
in the religion and art of all times does not

Left, a mask used in the ancient
No drama of Japan, in which the
players often portray gods, spirits,
or demons. Above right, masked
performers in Japanese dance theater
Below right, an actor in Japan's
Kabuki drama, dressed as a medieval
hero, with mask- like make-up.

238

merely emphasize the importance of the sym-
bol ; it shows how vital it is for men to integrate
into their lives the symbol's psychic content —
instinct. In itself, an animal is neither good nor
evil; it is a piece of nature. It cannot desire
anything that is not in its nature. To put this
another way, it obeys its instincts. These in-
stincts often seem mysterious to us, but they
have their parallel in human life: The founda-
tion of human nature is instinct.

But in man, the “animal being" (which lives
in him as his instinctual psyche) may become
dangerous if it is not recognized and integrated
in life. Man is the only creature with the power
to control instinct by his own will, but he is also
able to suppress, distort, and wound it— and an
animal, tospeak metaphorically, is never so wild
and dangerous as when it is wounded. Sup-
pressed instincts can gain control of a man ; they
can even destroy him.

The familiar dream in which the dreamer is
pursued by an animal nearly always indicates
that an instinct has been split off from consci-
ousness and ought to be (or is trying to be) re-
admitted and integrated into life. The more
dangerous the behavior of the animal in the.
dream, the more unconscious is the primitive
and instinctual soul of the dreamer, and the
more imperative is its integration into his life if
some irreparable evil is to be forestalled.

Suppressed and wounded instincts are the
dangers threatening civilized man ; uninhibited
drives are the dangers threatening primitive
man. In both cases the “animal" is alienated
from its true nature; and for both, the accept-
ance of the animal soul is the condition .for
wholeness and a fully lived life. Primitive man
must tame the animal in himself and make it
his helpful companion: civilized man must heal
the animal in himself and make it his friend.

Other contributors to this book have d isc ussed
the importance of the stone and animal motifs
in terms of dream and myth; I have used them
here only as general examples of the appearance
of such living symbols throughout the history
of art (and especially religious art). Let us now
examine in the same way a most powerful and
universal symbol: the circle.

Examples of animal symbols of
divinities from three religions:

Top of page, the Hindu god Ganesha
(a painted sculpture from the
Royal Palace of Nepal), god of
prudence and wisdom; above, the
Greek god Zeus in the form of a
swan (with Leda); right, on opposite
sides of a medieval coin, the
crucified Christ shown as a man
and as a serpent

239

The symbol of the circle

Dr. M.-L. von Franz has explained the circle
for sphere) as a symbol of the Self. It expresses
the totality of the psyche in all its aspects, in-
cluding the relationship between man and the
whole of nature. Whether the symbol of the
circle appears in primitive sun worship or
modern religion, in myths or dreams, in the
mandalas drawn by Tibetan monks, in the
ground plans of cities, or in the spherical con-
cepts of early astronomers, it always points to
the single most vital aspect of life its ultimate
wholeness.

An Indian creation myth relates that the
god Brahma, standing on a huge, thousand-
petaled lotus, turned his eyes to the four points
of the compass. This fourfold survey from the
circle of the lotus was a kind of preliminary
orientation, an indispensable taking of bearings,
before he began his work of creation.

A similar story is told of Buddha. At the
moment of his birth, a lotus flower rose from the
earth and he stepped into it to gaze into the 10
directions of space. (The lotus in this case was
eight-raved; and Buddha also gazed upward
and downward, making 10 directions.) This
symbolic gesture of survey was the most concise
method of showing that from the moment of
his birth, the Buddha was a unique personality,
predestined to receive illumination. His person-
ality and his further existence were given the
imprint of wholeness.

The spatial orientation performed by Brahma
and Buddha may be regarded as symbolic of the
human need for psychic orientation. File four
functions of consciousness described by Dr. Jung
in his chapter, p. 61 — thought, feeling, intui-
tion, and sensation equip man to deal with
the impressions of the world he receives from
within and without. It is by means of these
functions that he comprehends and assimilates
his experience; it is by means of them that he
can respond. Brahma's four-fold survey of the
universe symbolizes the necessary integration of

these four functions that man must achieve. (In
art, the circle is often eight-rayed. This expresses
a reciprocal overlapping of the four functions of
consciousness, so that four further intermediate
functions come about --for instance, thought
colored by feeling or intuition, or feeling tend-
ing toward sensation.)

In the visual art of India and the Far East,
the four- or eight-rayed circle is the usual pat-
tern of the religious images that serve as instru-
ments of meditation. In Tibetan Lamaism
especially, richly figured mandalas play an
important part. As a rule, these mandalas repre-
sent the cosmos in its relation to divine powers.

But a great many of the eastern meditation
figures are purely geometrical in design; these
are called yantras. Aside from the circle, a very
common yantra motif is formed by two inter-
penetrating triangles, one point-upward, the
other point-downward. Traditionally, thisshape
symbolizes the union of Shiva and Shakti, the
male and female divinities, a subject that also
appears in sculpture in countless variations. In
terms of psychological symbolism, it expresses
the union of opposites -the union of the per-
sonal, temporal world of the ego with the
non-personal, timeless world of the non-ego.
Ultimately, this union is the fulfillment and goal
of all religions: It is the union of the soul with
God. The two interpenetrating triangles have a
symbolic meaning similar to that of the more

Right, a yantra (a form of mandala),
composed of nine linked triangles.
The mandala, symbolizing wholeness
is often connected with exceptional
beings of myth or legend. Far right,
a Tibetan painting of the birth of
Buddha; in the lower left corner,
Buddha takes his first stepson a
cross formed of circular blossoms
Above right, the birth of Alexander
the Great {a 1 6th-century manuscript
illustration) heralded by comets —
in circular or mandala form

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common circular mandala. They represent the
wholeness of the psyche or Self, of which con-
sciousness is just as much a part as the
unconscious.

In both the triangle yantras and the
sculptural representations of the union of Shiva
and Shakti, the emphasis lies on a tension be-
tween the opposites. Hence the marked erotic
and emotional character of many of them. This
dynamic quality implies a process - the crea-
tion, or coming into being, of wholeness— while
the four- or eight-rayed circle represents whole-
ness as such, as an existing entity.

The abstract circle also figures in Zen paint-
ing. Speaking of a picture entitled The Circle ,
by the famous Zen priest Sangai, another Zen
master writes: “In the Zen sect, the circle re-
presents enlightenment. It symbolizes human
perfection."

Abstract mandalas also appear in European
Christian art. Some of the most splendid
examples are the rose windows of the cathedrals.
These are representations of the Self of man
transposed onto the cosmic plane. (A cosmic
mandala in the shape of a shining white rose
was rev ealed to Dante in a vision.) We may re-
gard as mandalas the haloes of Christ and the
Christian saints in religious paintings. In many
cases, the halo of Christ is alone divided into
four, a significant allusion to his sufferings as
the Son of Man and his death on the Cross, and
at the same time a symbol of his differentiated
wholeness. On the walls of early Romanesque
churches, abstract circular figures can some-
times be seen; they may go back to pagan
originals.

In non-Christian art, such circles are called
“sun wheels." They appear in rock engravings
that date back to the neolithic epoch before the
wheel was invented. As Jung has pointed out,
the term “sun wheel" denotes only the external
aspect of the figure. What really mattered at
all times was the experience of an archetypal.

24 1

Left, an example of the mandala in
religious architecture: the Angkor
Wat Buddhist temple in Cambodia,
a square building with entrances at
the four corners. Right, the ruins
of a fortified camp in Denmark (c
a d 1000), which was laid out in
a circle - as is the fortress town
(center right) of Palmanova, Italy
(built in 1 593), with its star-
shaped fortifications Far right,
the streets that meet at L'Etoile, Paris,
to form a mandala.

inner image, which Stone Age man rendered in
his art as faithfully as he depicted hulls, gazelles,
or wild horses.

Many pictorial mandalas are to he found in
Christian art: lor example, the rather rare pic-
ture of the Virgin in the center of a circular
tree, which is the God-symhol of the burning
hush. The most widely current mandalas in
Christian art are those of Christ surrounded by
the four Evangelists. These go back to the
ancient Egyptian representations of the god
Horus and his lour sons.

In architecture the mandala also plays an
important part — but one that often passes
unnoticed. It forms the ground plan of both
secular and sacred buildings in nearly all civili-
zations; it enters into classical, medieval, and
even modern town planning. A classical example
appears in Plutarch's account of the foundation
of Rome. According to Plutarch, Romulus sent
for builders from Etruria who instructed him by
sacred usages and written rules about all the
ceremonies to be observed - in the same way "as
in the mysteries." First they dug a round pit
where tlie Comitium, or Court of Assembly, now
stands, and into this pit they threw symbolic
offerings of the fruits of the earth. Then each
man took a small piece of earth of the land from
which he came, and these were all thrown into
the pit together. The pit was given the name of
mundus (which also meant the cosmos). Around
it Romulus drew the boundary of the city in a
circle with a plow r drawn by a bull and a cow.
Wherever a gate was planned, the plowshare
was taken out and the plow carried over.

The city founded in this solemn ceremony
was circular in shape. Yet the old and famous

description of Rome is urbs quadrata , the
square city. According to one theory that
attempts to reconcile this contradiction, the
word quadrata must be understood to mean
"quadripartite"; that is, the circular city was
divided into four parts by two main arteries
running from north to south and west to east.
The point of intersection coincided with the
mundus mentioned by Plutarch.

According to another theory, the contradic-
tion can be understood only as a symbol, namely
as a \ isual representation of the mathematically
insoluble problem of the squaring of the circle,
which had greatly preoccupied the Greeks and
was to play so great a part in alchemy. Strangely
enough, before describing the circle ceremony
of the foundation of the city by Romulus,
Plutarch also speaks of Rome as Roma quad-
rat a, a square city. For him, Rome was both a
circle and a square.

In each theory a true mandala is involved,
and that links up with Plutarch’s statement that
the foundation of the city was taught by the
Etruscans "as in the mysteries,” as a secret rite.
It was more than a mere outward form. By its
mandala ground plan, the city, with its inhabi-
tants, is exalted above the purely secular realm.
This is further emphasized by the fact that the
city has a center, the mundus , which established
the city’s relationship to the "other” realm, the
abode of the ancestral spirits. (The mundus was
covered by a great stone, called the "soul stone.”
On certain days the stone was removed, and
then, it was said, the spirits of the dead rose
from the shaft.)

A number of medieval cities were founded
on the ground plan of a mandala and were

- 4 -

surrounded by an approximately circular wall.
In such a city, as in Rome, two main arteries
divided it into “quarters” and led to the four
gates. The church or cathedral stood at the
point of intersection of these arteries. The in-
spiration of the medieval city with its quarters
was the Heavenly Jerusalem (in the Book of
Revelation), which had a square ground plan
and walls with three times four gates. But Jeru-
salem had no temple at its center, for God’s
immediate presence was the center of it. (The
mandala ground plan for a city is by no means
outmoded. A modern example is the city of
Washington, D.C.)

Whether in classical or in primitive founda-
tions, the mandala ground plan was never
dictated by considerations of aesthetics or
economics. It was a transformation of the city
into an ordered cosmos, a sacred place bound
by its center to the other world. And this trans-
formation accorded with the vital feelings and
needs of religious man.

Every building, sacred or secular, that has a
mandala ground plan is the projection of an
archetypal image from within the human un-
conscious onto the outer world. The city, the
fortress, and the temple become symbols of
psychic wholeness, and in this way exercise a
specific influence on the human being who
enters or lives in the place. (It need hardly be
emphasized that even in architecture the pro-
jection of the psychic content was a purely un-
conscious process. “Such things cannot be
thought up,” Dr. Jung has written, “but must
grow again from the forgotten depths if they are
to express the deepest insights of consciousness
and the loftiest intuitions of the spiri t, thusamal-
gamating the uniqueness of present-day consci-
ousness with the age-old past of humanity.” )

The central symbol of Christian art is not the
mandala, but the cross or crucifix. Up to Caro-
lingian times, the equilateral or Greek cross was
the usual form, and therefore the mandala was
indirectly implied. But in the course of time the

Medieval religious architecture was
usually based on the shape of the
cross. Left, a 1 3th -century church
(in Ethiopia) cut from the rock.

Renaissance religious art shows a
reorientation to the earth and the
body: Right, a plan fora circular
church or basilica based on the
body's proportions, drawn by the
1 5th-century Italian artist and
architect Francesco di Giorgio.

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243

center moved upward until the cross took on
the Latin form, with the stake and the cross-
beam, that is customary today. This develop-
ment is important because it corresponds to the
inward development of Christianity up to the
high Middle Ages. In simple terms, it symbo-
lized the tendency to remove the center of man
and his faith from the earth and to "elevate" it
into the spiritual sphere. This tendency sprang
from the desire to put into action Christ’s say-
ing: “My kingdom is not of this world.” Earthly
life, the world, and the body were therefore
forces that had to be overcome. Medieval man's
hopes were thus directed to the beyond, for it
was only from paradise that the promise of
fulfillment beckoned.

This endeavor reached its climax in the
Middle Ages and in medieval mysticism. The
hopes of the beyond found expression not only
in the raising of the center of the cross; it can
also be seen in the increasing height of the
Gothic cathedrals, which seem to set the laws
of gravity at defiance. Their cruciform ground
plan is that of the elongated Latin cross (though

the baptisteries, with the font in the center, have
a true mandala ground plan).

With the dawning of the Renaissance, a revo-
lutionary change began to occur in man's con-
ception of the world. The “upward" movement
(which reached its climax in the late Middle
Ages) went into reverse; man turned back to
the earth. He rediscovered the beauties of
nature and the body, made the first circumnavi-
gation of the globe, and proved the world to be
a sphere. The laws of mechanics and causality
became the foundations of science. The world of
religious feeling, of the irrational, and of mysti-
cism, which had played so great a part in medi-
eval times, was more and more submerged by
the triumphs of logical thought.

Similarly, art became more realistic and sen-
suous. It broke away from the religious subjects
of' the Middle Ages and embraced the whole
visible world. It was overwhelmed by the mani-
foldness of the earth, by its splendor and horror,
and became what Gothic art had been before
it : a true symbol of' the spirit of the age. Thus
it can hardly be regarded as accidental that

a change also came over ecclesiastical build-
ing. In contrast to the soaring Gothic cathedrals,
there were more circular ground plans. The
circle replaced the Latin cross.

This change in form, however — and this is
the important point for the history of symbol-
ism must be attributed to aesthetic, and not to
religious, causes. That is the only possible ex-
planation for the fact that the center of these
round churches (the truly “holy” place) is
empty, and that the altar stands in a recess in
a wall away from the center. For that reason
the plan cannot be described as a true man-
dala. An important exception is St. Peter’s in
Rome, which was built to the plans of Bra-
mante and Michelangelo. Here the altar stands
in the center. One is tempted, however, to
attribute this exception to the genius of the
architects, for great genius is always both of and
beyond its time.

In spite of the far-reaching changes in art,
philosophy, and science brought about by the
Renaissance, the central symbol of Christianity
remained unchanged. Christ was still repre-

sented on the Latin cross, as he is today. That
meant that the center of religious man re-
mained anchored on a higher, more spiritual
plane than that of earthly man, who had
turned back to nature. Thus a rift arose be-
tween man’s traditional Christianity and his
rational or intellectual mind. Since that time,
these two sides of modern man have never been
brought together. In the course of the centuries,
with man’s growing insight into nature and its
laws, this division has gradually grown wider;
and it still splits the psyche of the western
Christian in the 20th century.

Of course, the brief historical summary given
here has been over-simplified. Moreover, it
omits the secret religious movements within
Christianity that took account, in their beliefs,
of what was usually ignored by most Chris-
tians: the question of evil, the chthonic (or
earthly) spirit. Such movements were always in
a minority and seldom had any very visible
influence, but in their way they fulfilled the
important role of a contrapuntal accompani-
ment to Christian spirituality.

The Renaissance interest in outer
reality produced the Copernican sun-
centered universe (left) and turned
artists away from "imaginative" art
to nature: Below left, Leonardo's
study of the human heart.

Renaissance art — with its sensuous
concern with light, nature, and the
body (far left, a Tintoretto, 1 6th
century) — set a pattern that lasted
until the Impressionists. Below, a
painting by Renoir (1841 -1919).

Far left, the symbolic alchemical
concept of the squared circle —
symbol of wholeness and of
the union of opposites (note the
male and female figures) - Left,
a modern squared circle by the
British artist Ben Nicholson (born
1 894) : It is a strictly geometrical,
empty form possessing aesthetic
harmony and beauty but without
symbolic meaning.

Right, a "sun wheel' in a painting
by the modern Japanese artist Sofu
Teshigahara (born 1900) follows the
tendency of many modern painters,
when using "circular" shapes, to make
them asymmetrical.

Among the many sects and movements that
arose about a.d. 1000, the alchemists played a
very important part. They exalted the mysteries
of matter and set them alongside those of the
“heavenly'’ spirit of Christianity. What they
sought was a wholeness of man encompassing
mind and body, and they invented a thousand
names and symbols for it. One of their central
symbols was the quadratura circu/i (the squar-
ing of the circle), which is no more than the
true mandala.

The alchemists not only recorded their work
in their writings; they created a wealth of pic-
tures of their dreams and visions — symbolic
pictures that are still as profound as they are
baffling. They were inspired by the dark side of
nature — evil, the dream, the spirit of earth.
The mode of expression was always fabulous,
dreamlike, and unreal, in both word and pic-
ture. The great 15th-century Flemish painter
Hieronymus Bosch may be regarded as the
most important representative of this kind of
imaginative art.

But at the same time, more typical Renais-
sance painters (working in the full light of day,
so to speak) were producing the most splendid
works of sensuous art. Their fascination with
earth and nature went so deep that it practi-
cally determined the development of visual art
for the next five centuries. The last great repre-
sentatives of sensuous art, the art of the passing
moment, of light and air, were the 19th-century
impressionists.

We may here discriminate between two radi-
cally different modes of artistic representation.
Many attempts have been made to define their
characteristics. Recently Herbert Kiihn (whose
work on the cave-paintings I have already men-
tioned) has tried to draw a distinction between
what he calls the “imaginative’ 1 and the “sen-
sory" style. The “sensory 11 style generally de-
picts a direct reproduction of nature or of the
picture-subject. The “imaginative,” on the
other hand, presents a fantasy or experience of
the artist in an “unrealistic,” even dreamlike,
and sometimes “abstract” manner. Kuhn’s two
conceptions seem so simple and so clear that I
am glad to make use of them.

The first beginnings of imaginative art go
back very far in history. In the Mediterranean
basin, its efflorescence dates from the third mill-
ennium b.c. It has only recently been realized
that these ancient works of art are not the
results of incompetence or ignorance; they are
modes of expression of a perfectly definite reli-
gious and spiritual emotion. And they have a
special appeal today, for, during the last half-
century, art has been passing once more
through a phase that can be described by the
term “imaginative."

Today the geometrical, or “abstract," symbol
of the circle has again come to play a con-
siderable role in painting. But with few excep-
tions the traditional mode of representation has
undergone a characteristic transformation that
corresponds to thedilemma of modern man's ex-

246

istence. The circle is no longer a single mean-
ingful figure that embraces a whole world and
dominates the picture. Sometimes the artist has
taken it out of its dominant position, replacing
it by a loosely organized group of circles. Some-
times the plane of the circle is asymmetrical.

An example of the asymmetrical circular
plane may be seen in the famous sun disks of'
the French painter Robert Delaunay. A paint-
ing by the modern English painter Ceri
Richards, now in Dr. Jung's collection, contains
an entirely asymmetrical circular plane, while
far to the left there appears a very much smaller
and empty circle.

In the French painter Henri Matisse's Still
Life with Vase of Nasturtiums , the focus of'
vision is a green sphere on a slanting black
beam, which seems to gather into itself the
manifold circles of the nasturtium leaves. The
sphere overlaps a rectangular figure, the top
left-hand corner of which is folded over. Given
the artistic perfection of the painting it is easy
to forget that in the past these two abstract
figures (the circle and the square] would have
been united, and would have expressed a world
of thoughts and feelings. But am one who does
remember, and raises the question of meaning,
will find food for thought: The two figures that
from the beginning of time have formed a whole
are in this painting torn apart or incoherently
related. Yet both are there and are touching
each other.

In a picture painted by the Russian-born
artist Wassily Kandinsky there is a loose assem-
bly of colored balls or circles that seem to be
drifting like soap bubbles. They, too, are tenu-
ously connected with a background of one large
rectangle with two small, almost square rect-
angles contained in it. I n another picture, which
he called A Few Circles , a dark cloud (or is it a

Left. Limits of Understanding by
Paul Klee (1879-1 940) -one 20th-
century painting in which the
symbol of the circle retains a
dominant position.

2 47

swooping bird? ) again bears a loosely arranged
group of bright balls or circles.

Circles often appear in unexpected con-
nections in the mysterious compositions of the
British artist Paul Nash. In the primeval soli-
tude of his landscape Event on the Downs , a
ball lies in the right foreground. Though it is
apparently a tennis ball, the design on its
surface forms the Tai-gi-lu , the Chinese sym-
bol of eternity; thus it opens up a new
dimension in the loneliness ol the landscape.
Something similar happens in Nashfs Land-
scape from a Dream. Balls are rolling out of sight
in an infinitely wide mirrored landscape, with
a huge sun visible on the horizon. Another ball
lies in the foreground, in front of the roughly
square mirror.

In his drawing Limits of Understanding , the
Swiss artist Paul Klee places the simple figure
of a sphere or a circle above a complex struc-

Circles appear broken or loosely
scattered in The Sun and the Moon,
top, by Robert Delaunay (1885-
1 941 ); in A Few Circles, left,
by Kandinsky (1 866-1 944), and in
Landscape from a Dream, right,
by Paul Nash (1889-1946) Below,
Composition by Piet Mondrian
(1872 -1944) is dominated by squares.

248

tmv of ladders and lines. Dr. Jung has pointed
out that a true symbol appears only when there
is a need to express what thought cannot think
or what is only divined or lelt; that is the pur-
pose of Klee's simple figure at the “limits of
understanding."

It is important to note that the square, or
groups of rectangles and squares, or rectangles
and rhomboids, have appeared in modern art
just as often as the circle. The master of har-
monious (indeed, “musical") compositions w ith
squares is the Dutch-born artist Piet Mondrian.
As a rule there is no actual center in any of his
pictures, yet they form an ordered whole in
their own strict, almost ascetic fashion. Still
more common are paintings by other artists
with irregular quaternary compositions, or
numerous rectangles combined in more or less
loose groups.

The circle is a symbol of the psyche (even
Plato described the psyche as a sphere). The
square and often the rectangle) is a symbol
of carthbound matter, of the body and reality.
In most modern art, the connection between
these two primary forms is either nonexistent,
or loose and. casual. Their separation is
another symbolic expression of the psychic
state of 20th-century man: His soul has lost
its roots and he is threatened bv dissocia-

tion. Even in the world situation of today
(as Dr. Jung pointed out in his opening chap-
ter), this split has become evident: The west-
ern and eastern halves of the earth are separ-
ated by an Iron Curtain.

But the frequency with which the square and
the circle appear must not be overlooked. There
seems to be an uninterrupted psychic urge to
bring into consciousness the basic factors of life
that they symbolize. Also, in certain abstract
pictures of our time (which merely represent a
colored structure or a kind of “primal matter"’),
these forms occasionally appear as if they were
germs of new growth.

The symbol of the circle has played a curious
part in a very different phenomenon of the life
of our day, and occasionally still does so. In
the last years of the Second World War, there
arose the “visionary rumor" of round flying
bodies that became known as “flying saucers"
or UFOs i unidentified flying objects). Jung has
explained the UFOs as a projection of a psy-
chic content (of wholeness) that has at all times
been symbolized by the circle. In other words,
this “visionary rumor," as can also be seen in
many dreams of our time, is an attempt by the
unconscious collective psyche to heal the split in
our apocalyptic age by means of the symbol
of the circle.

Above, an illustration from a 1 6th
century German broadsheet of some
strange circular objects seen in
the sky similar to the "flying
saucers'" that have been seen in
recent years. Jung has suggested
that such visions are projections
of the archetype of wholeness.

*49

Modern painting as a symbol

The terms “modern art” and “modern paint-
ing" are used in this chapter as the layman uses
them. What I will be dealing with, to use
Kuhn's term, is modern imaginative painting.
Pictures of this kind can be “abstract” (or rather
“non-figurative”) but they need not always be
so. There will be no attempt to distinguish
among such various forms as lauvism, cubism,
expressionism, futurism, Suprematism, con-
structivism, orphism, and so on. Any specific
allusion to one or the other of these groups will
be quite exceptional.

And I am not concerned with an aesthetic
differentiation of modern paintings; nor, above
all, with artistic evaluations. Modern imagina-
tive painting is here taken simply as a phenome-
non of our time. That is the only way in which
the question of its symbolic content can be justi-
fied and answered. In this brief chapter it is pos-
sible to mention only a few artists, and to
select a few of their works more or less at ran-
dom. 1 must content myself with discussing
modern painting in terms of a small number of
its representatives.

My starting point is the psychological fact
that the artist has at all times been the instru-
ment and spokesman of the spirit of his age.
His work can be only partly understood in
terms of his personal psychology. Consciously
or unconsciously, the artist gives form to the
nature and values of his time, which in their
turn form him.

The modern artist himself often recognizes
the interrelation of the work of art and its time.
Thus the French critic and painter Jean Baz-
aine writes in his Notes on Contemporary
Painting : “Nobody paints as he likes. All a
painter can do is to will with all his might the
painting his age is capable of.” The German
artist Franz Marc, who died in the First World
War, said : “The great artists do not seek their
forms in the mist of the past, but take the deep-
est soundings they can of the genuine, pro-

foundest center of gravity of their age.” And,
as far back as 1911, Kandinsky wrote in his
famous essay “Concerning the Spiritual in
Art”: “Every epoch is given its own measure
of artistic freedom, and even the most creative
genius may not leap over the boundary of that
freedom.”

For the last 50 years, “modern art” has been
a general bone of contention, and the discussion
has lost none of its heat. The “yeas” are as
passionate as the “nays”; yet the reiterated
prophecy that “modern” art is finished has
never come true. The new way of expression
has been triumphant to an unimagined degree.
If it is threatened at all, it will be because it
has degenerated into mannerism and modish-
ness. (In the Soviet Union, where non-figura-
tive art has often been officially discouraged
and produced only in private, figurative art is
threatened by a similar degeneration.)

The general public, in Europe at any rate,
is still in the heat of the battle. The violence
of the discussion shows that feeling runs high
in both camps. Even those who are hostile to
modern art cannot avoid being impressed by
the works they reject; they are irritated or re-
pelled, but (as the violence of their feelings
shows) they are moved. As a rule, the negative
fascination is no less strong than the positive.
The stream of visitors to exhibitions of modern
art, wherever and whenever they take place,
testifies to something more than curiosity.
Curiosity would be satisfied sooner. And the
fantastic prices that are paid lor works of
modern art are a measure of the status con-
ferred upon them by society.

Fascination arises when the unconscious has
been moved. The effect produced by works of
modern art cannot be explained entirely by
their visible form. To the eye trained in “clas-
sic” or “sensory" art,' they are new and alien.
Nothing in works of non-figurative art reminds
the spectator of his own world no objects in

their own everyday surroundings, no human
being or animal that speaks a familiar lan-
guage. There is no welcome, no visible accord
in the cosmos created by the artist. And yet,
without any question, there is a human bond.
It may be even more intense than in works of
sensory art, which make a direct appeal to feel-
ing and empathy.

It is the aim of the modern artist to give
expression to his inner vision of man, to the
spiritual background of life and the world. The
modern work of art has abandoned not only
the realm of the concrete, “natural," sensuous
world, but also that of the individual. It has
become highly collective and therefore (even
in the abbreviation of the pictorial hieroglyph)
touches not only the few but the many. What
remains individual is the manner of represen-
tation, the style and quality of' the modern
work of art. It is often difficult for the layman
to recognize whether the artist's intentions are
genuine and his expressions spontaneous,
neither imitated nor aimed at effect. In many
cases he must accustom himself to new kinds
of line and color. He must learn them, as he
would learn a foreign language, before he can
judge their expressiveness and quality.

The pioneers of modern art have apparently
understood how much they were asking of the
public. Never have artists published so many
“manifestoes" and explanations of their aims
as in the 20th century. It is, however, not only
to others that they are striving to explain and

justify what they are doing; it is also to them-
selves. For the most part, these manifestoes are
artistic confessions of faith — poetic and often
confused or self-contradictory attempts to give
clarity to the strange outcome of today's artistic
activities.

What really matters, of course, is (and
always has been) the direct encounter with the
work of art. Yet, for the psychologist who is
concerned with the symbolic content of modern
art, the study of these writings is most instruc-
tive. For that reason the artists, wherever pos-
sible, will be allowed in the following discus-
sion to speak for themselves.

The beginnings of modern art appeared in
the early 1900s. One of the most impressive
personalities of that initiatory phase was Kan-
dinsky, whose influence is still clearly traceable
in the paintings of the second half of the cen-
tury. Many of his ideas have proved prophetic.
In his essay “Concerning Form," he writes:
vw The art of today embodies the spiritual ma-
tured to the point of revelation. The forms of
this embodiment may be arranged between two
poles: (1) great abstraction; (2) great realism.
These two poles open two paths, which both
lead to one goal in the end. These two elements
have always been present in art ; the first was ex-
pressed in the second. Today it looks as if they
were about to carry on separate existences. Art
seems to have put an end to the pleasant com-
pletion of the abstract by the concrete, and
vice versa."

Sensor/ (or representational) art
versus imaginative (or "unrealistic")
art: Right, a painting by the 1 9th-
century British artist William
Frith, part of a sequence depicting
a gambler's downfall This is one
extreme of representational art:

It has declined into mannerism and
sentiment Left, an extreme of
imaginative (and, here, "abstract")
art by Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935).

Suprematist Composition. White on White 1 91 8.
Collection , The Museum of Modern Art. New York

Left and above, two compositions
by Kurt Schwitters (1 887-1948).
His kind of imaginative art uses
(and transforms) ordinary things —
in this case, old tickets, paper,
metal, etc. Below left, pieces of
wood similarly used by Hans Arp
(1 887-1 966). Below, in a sculpture
by Picasso (1 881 -1973), ordinary
objects— leaves— are part of the
subject rather than the material.

To illustrate Kandinsky's point that the two
elements of art, the abstract and the concrete,
have parted company: In 1913, the Russian
painter Kasimir Malevich painted a picture
that consisted only of a black square on a white
ground. It was perhaps the first purely “ab-
stract’' picture ever painted. He wrote of it:
“In my desperate struggle to liberate art from
the ballast of the world of objects, I took refuge
in the form of the square/’

A year later, the French painter Marcel
Duchamp set up an object chosen at random
(a bottle rack) on a pedestal and exhibited it.
Jean Bazaine wrote of it: “This bottle rack,
torn from its utilitarian context and washed
up on the beach, has been invested with
the lonely dignity of the derelict. Good for
nothing, there to be used, ready for anything,
it is alive. It lives on the fringe of existence its
own disturbing, absurd life. The disturbing
object — that is the first step to art.”

In its weird dignity and abandonment, the
object was immeasurably exalted and given
significance that can only be called magical.
Hence its “disturbing, absurd life.” It became
an idol and at the same time an object of
mockery. Its intrinsic reality was annihilated.

Both Malevich’s square and Duchamp's
bottle rack were symbolic gestures that had
nothing to do with art in the strict sense of
the word. Yet they mark the two extremes
(“great abstraction” and “great realism”) be-
tween which the imaginative art of the succeed-
ing decades may be aligned and understood.

From the psychological standpoint, the two
gestures toward the naked object (matter) and
the naked non -object (spirit) point to a collec-
tive psychic rif t that created its symbolic expres-
sion in the years before the catastrophe of the
First World War. This rift had first appeared
in the Renaissance, when it became manifest as
a conflict between knowledge and faith. Mean-
while, civilization was removing man further
and further from his instinctual foundation, so
that a gull opened between nature and mind,
between the unconscious and consciousness.
These opposites characterize the psychic situa-
tion that is seeking expression in modern art.

The secret soul of things

As we have seen, the starting point of “the
concrete” was Duchamp’s famous — or notori-
ous — bottle rack. The bottle rack was not in-
tended to be artistic in itself. Duchamp called
himself an “anti-artist.” But it brought to light
an element that was to mean a great deal to
artists for a long time to come. The name they
gave to it was objet trouve or “ready-made.”

The Spanish painter Joan Miro, for instance,
goes to the beach every dawn “to collect things
washed up by the tide. Things lying there,
waiting for someone to discover their person-
ality/’ He keeps his finds in his studio. Now
and then he assembles some of them and the
most curious compositions result: “The artist
is often surprised himself at the shapes of his
own creation.”

As far back as 1912, the Spanish-born artist
Pablo Picasso and the French artist Georges
Braque made what they called “collages” from
scraps of rubbish. Max Ernst cut clippings from
the illustrated papers of the so-called age of big
business, assembled them as the fancy took him,
and so transformed the stuffy solidity of the
bourgeois age into a demonic, dreamlike un-
reality. The German painter Kurt Schwitters
worked with the contents of his ash can : He
used nails, brown paper, ragged scraps of news-
paper, railway tickets, and remnants of cloth.
He succeeded in assembling this rubbish with
such seriousness and freshness that surprising
effects of strange beauty came about. In
Schwitters’ obsession with things, however, this
manner of composition occasionally became
merely absurd. He made a construction of
rubbish that he called “a cathedral built for
things.” Schwitters worked on it for 10 years,
and three stories of his own house had to be de-
molished to give him the space he needed.

Schwitters’ work, and the magical exaltation
of the object, give the first hint of the place of
modern art in the history of the human mind,
and of its symbolic significance. They reveal

the tradition that was being unconsciously per-
petuated. It is the tradition of the hermetic
Christian brotherhoods of the Middle Ages,
and of the alchemists, who conferred even on
matter, the stuff of the earth, the dignity of
their religious contemplation.

Schwitters’ exaltation of the grossest material
to the rank of art, to a “cathedral” (in which
the rubbish would leave no room for a human
being), faithfully followed the old alchemical
tenet according to which the sought-for pre-
cious object is to be found in filth. Kandinsky
expressed the same ideas when he wrote :
“Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the
things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers,
but even a white trouser button glittering out
of' a puddle in the street .... Everything has
a secret soul, which is silent more often than it
speaks.”

What the artists, like the alchemists, prob-
ably did not realize was the psychological fact
that they were projecting part of their psyche
into matter or inanimate objects. Hence the
“mysterious animation” that entered into such
things, and the great value attached even to
rubbish. They projected their own darkness,
their earthly shadow, a psychic content that
they and their time had lost and abandoned.

Unlike the alchemists, however, men like
Schwitters were not contained in and protected
by the Christian order. In one sense, Schwit-
ters’ work is opposed to it: A kind of mono-
mania binds him to matter, while Christianity
seeks to vanquish matter. And yet,' paradoxi-
cally, it is Schwitters’ monomania that robs the
material in his creations of its inherent signifi-
cance as concrete reality. In his pictures, matter
is transformed into an “abstract” composition.
Therefore it begins to discard its substantiality,
and to dissolve. In that very process, these pic-
tures become a symbolic expression of our time,
which has seen the concept of the “absolute”
concreteness of matter undermined by modern
atomic physics.

Painters began to think about the “magic
object” and the “secret soul” of things. The
Italian painter Carlo Carra wrote: “It is
common things that reveal those forms of

simplicity through which we can realize that
higher, more significant condition of being
where the whole splendor of art resides.”
Paul Klee said: “The object expands beyond
the bounds of its appearance by our knowledge
that the thing is more than its exterior presents
to our eyes.” And Jean Bazaine wrote: “An
object awakens our love just because it seems
to be the bearer of powers that are greater
than itself.”

Sayings of this kind recall the old alchemical
concept of a “spirit in matter,” believed to be
the spirit in and behind inanimate objects like
metal or stone. Psychologically interpreted, this
spirit is the unconscious. It always manifests
itself when conscious or rational knowledge has
reached its limits and mystery sets in, for man
tends to fill the inexplicable and mysterious
with the contents of his unconscious. He pro-
jects them, as it were, into a dark, empty vessel.

The feeling that the object was “more than
met the eye,” which was shared by many art-
ists, found a most remarkable expression in
the work of the Italian painter Giorgio de
Chirico. He was a mystic by temperament, and
a tragic seeker who never found what he
sought. On his self-portrait (1908) he wrote:
El quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est (“And
what am I to love if not the enigma?”).

Chirico was the founder of the so-called
pi dura metajisica . “Every object,” he wrote,
“has two aspects: The common aspect, which
is the one we generally see and which is seen
by everyone, and the ghostly and metaphysical
aspect, which only rare individuals see at
moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical
meditation. A work of art must relate some-
thing that does not appear in its visible form.”

Chirico’s works reveal this “ghostly aspect”
of things. They are dreamlike transpositions of
reality, which arise as visions from the uncon-
scious. But his “metaphysical abstraction” is
expressed in a panic-stricken rigidity, and the
atmosphere of the pictures is one of nightmare
and of fathomless melancholy. The city squares
of Italy, the towers and objects, are set in an
over-acute perspective, as if they were in a
vacuum, illuminated by a merciless, cold light

An example of 'surrealist'' art:
LesSou/iers Rouges , by the French
painter Rene Magritte (1898-1967)
Much of the disturbing effect of
surrealist painting comes from its
association and juxtaposition of
unrelated objects often absurd,
irrational, and dreamlike.

from an unseen source. Antique heads or
statues of gods conjure up the classical past.

In one of the most terrifying of his pictures,
he has placed beside the marble head of a god-
dess a pair of red rubber gloves, a "magic
object" in the modern sense. A green ball on the
ground acts as a symbol, uniting the crass
opposites; without it, there would be more than
a hint of psychic disintegration. This picture was
clearly not the result of over-sophisticated de-
liberation ; it must be taken as a dream picture.

Chirico was deeply influenced by the philo-
sophies of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. He
wrote: "Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were the
first to teach the deep significance of the sense-
lessness of life, and to show how this senseless-
ness could be transformed into art ... . The
dreadful void they discovered is the very soul-
less and untroubled beauty of matter." It may
be doubted whether Chirico succeeded in trans-
posing the "dreadful void" into "untroubled
beauty." Some of his pictures are extremely
disturbing; many are as terrifying as night-
man’s. But in his effort to find artistic expres-

sion for the void, he penetrated to the core of
the existential dilemma of contemporary man.

Nietzsche, whom Chirico quotes as his auth-
ority, has given a name to the "dreadful void"
in his saying "God is dead." Without referring
to Nietzsche, Kandinsky wrote in On the Spiri-
tual in Art : "Heaven is empty. God is dead."
A phrase of this kind may sound abominable.
But it is not new. The idea of the "death ofGod"
and its immediate consequence, the "mcta-
ph ysical void," had troubled the minds of 19th-
century poets, especially in France and Ger-
many. It was a long development that, in the
20th century, reached the stage of open discus-
sion and found expression in art. The cleavage
between modern art and Christianity was fin-
ally accomplished.

Dr. Jung also came to realize that this
strange and mysterious phenomenon of the
death of* God is a psychic fact of our time. In
1937 he wrote: "I know and here I am ex-
pressing what countless other people know —
that the present time is the time of God's dis-
appearance and death." For years he had ob-
served the Christian God-image fading in his
patients' dreams— that is, in the unconscious of
modern men. The loss of that image is the loss
of the supreme factor that gives life a meaning.

It must be pointed out, however, that neither
Nietzsche's assertion that God is dead, nor
Chirico's "metaphysical void," nor Jung's de-
ductions from unconscious images, have any-
thing final to say about the reality and exist-
ence of God or of a transcendental being or
not-being. They are human assertions. In each
case they are based, as Jung has shown in
Psychology and Religion , on contents of the
unconscious psyche that have entered conscious-
ness in tangible form as images, dreams, ideas,
or intuitions. 'The origin of these contents, and
the cause of* such a transformation (from a
living to a dead God), must remain unknown,
on the frontier of mystery.

Chirico never came to a solution of the pro-
blem presented to him by the unconscious. His
failure may be seen most clearly in his represen-
tation of the human figure. Given the present
religious situation, it is man himself to whom

Both Giorgio de Chirico (born 1 888)
and Marc Chagall (born 1 887) have
sought to look behind the outward
appearances of things; their work
seems to have risen from the depths
of the unconscious. But Chirico's
vision (below, h\$ Philosopher and
Poet) was gloomy, melancholy, even
nightmarish. Chagall's has always
been rich, warm, and alive. Right,
one of his great stained -glass
windows created in 1 962 for a
Jerusalem synagogue.

In Chirico's Song of Love (left),
the marble head of the goddess
and the rubber glove are crass
opposites The green ball seems
to act as a uniting symbol

Right, Metaphysical Muse by— Carlo
Carra (1 881 1966). The faceless
manikin was a frequent theme
of Chirico saswell.

256

should he accorded a new, if impersonal, dig-
nity and responsibility. (Jung described it as a
responsibility to consciousness.) But in Chirico’s
work, man is deprived of his soul; he becomes
a manichino , a puppet without a face (and
therefore also without consciousness).

In the various versions of his (heat Meta-
physician , a faceless figure is enthroned on a
pedestal made of rubbish. The figure is a con-
sciously or unconsciously ironical representation
of the man who strives to discover the "truth"
about metaphysics, and at the same time a
symbol of ultimate loneliness and senselessness.
Or perhaps the manichini (which also haunt
the works of other contemporary artists) are a
premonition of the faceless mass man.

When he was 40, Chirico, abandoned his pit-
lura metajisica; he turned back to traditional
modes, but his work lost depth. Here is certain
proof that there is no “back to where you came
from'' for the creative mind whose unconscious
has been involved in the fundamental dilemma
of modern existence.

A counterpart to Chirico might be seen in
the Russian- born painter Marc Chagall. His
quest in his work is also a “mysterious and
lonely poetry" and “the ghostly aspect of things
that only rare individuals may see." But Cha-
gall’s rich symbolism is rooted in the piety of
Eastern Jewish Hassidism and in a warm feel-
ing for life. He was faced with neither the pro-
blem of the void nor the death of God. He
wrote : “Everything may change in our demor-
alized world except the heart, man's love, and
his striving to know the divine. Painting, like
all poetry, has its part in the divine; people
feel this today just as much as they used to."

The British author Sir Herbert Read once
wrote of Chagall that he never quite crossed
the threshold into the unconscious, but “has
always kept one foot on the earth that had
nourished him.” This is exactly the “right” re-
lation to the unconscious. It is all the more im-
portant that, as Read emphasizes, “Chagall has
remained one of the most influential artists of
our time."

With the contrast between Chagall and Chi-
rico, a question arises that is important for the

understanding of symbolism in modern art :
How does the relationship between conscious-
ness and the unconscious take shape in the work
of modern artists? Or, to put it another way,
where does man stand?

One answer may be found in the movement
called surrealism, of which the French poet
Andre Breton is regarded as the founder. (Chi-
rico too may be described as a surrealist.) As a
student of medicine, Breton had been intro-
duced to the work of Freud. Thus dreams came
to play an important part in his ideas. "Can
dreams not be used to solve the fundamental
problems of life?” he wrote. “I believe that the
apparent antagonism between dream and re-
ality will be resolved in a kind of absolute
reality — in surreality.”

Breton grasped the point admirably. What
he sought was a reconciliation of the opposites,
consciousness and the unconscious. But the way
he took to reach his goal could only lead him
astray. He began to experiment with Freud’s
method of free association as well as with auto-
matic writing, in which the words and phrases
arising from the unconscious are set down with-
out any conscious control. Breton called it:
“thought’s dictation, independent of anv aes-
thetic or moral preoccupation.”

But that process simply means that the way
is opened to the stream of unconscious images,
and the important or even decisive part to be
played by consciousness is ignored. As Dr. Jung
has shown in his chapter, it is consciousness
that holds the key to the values of the uncon-
scious, and that therefore plays the decisive
part. Consciousness alone is competent to de-
termine the meaning of the images and to
recognize their significance for man here and
now, in the concrete reality of the present. Only
in an interplay of consciousness and the uncon-
scious can the unconscious prove its value, and
perhaps even show a way to overcome the mel-
ancholy of the void. If the unconscious, once in
action, is left to itself, there is a risk that its con-
tents will become overpowering or will mani-
fest their negative, destructive side.

If we look at surrealist pictures (like Salvador
Dali’s The Burning Giraffe) with this in mind,

we may feel the wealth of their fantasy and the
overwhelming power of their unconscious
imagery, but we realize the horror and the sym-
bolism of the end of all things that speaks from
many of them. The unconscious is pure nature,
and, like nature, pours out its gifts in profusion.
But left to itself and without the human re-
sponse from consciousness, it can (again like
nature) destroy its own gifts and sooner or later
sweep them into annihilation.

The question of the role of consciousness in
modern painting also arises in connection with
the use of chance as a means of composing
paintings. In Beyond Painting Max Ernst
wrote: “The association of a sewing machine
and an umbrella on a surgical table [he is
quoting from the poet Lautreamont] is a fami-
liar example, which has now become classical,
of the phenomenon discovered by the surreal-
ists, that the association of two (or more)
apparently alien elements on a plane alien to
both is the most potent ignition of poetry.”

That is probably as difficult for the layman
to comprehend as the comment Breton made
to the same effect : “The man who cannot visu-
alize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.”

One of the best-known of modern
"surrealist" painters is Salvador
Dali (born 1 904). Above, his
famous painting The Burning
Giraffe Below, one of Max Ernst's
frottages (usually rubbings taken
from scratches on tiles), from
his Natural History.

Ernst's Natural History resembles
the interest taken in the past in
"accidental" patterns in nature.
Below, an engraving of an 1 8th-
century Dutch museum exhibit that
is also a kind of surrealist "natural
history" with its inclusion of coral,
stones, and skeletons.

258

(We might recall here the “chance” association
of a marble head and red rubber gloves in Chi-
rico's picture.) Of course, many of these asso-
ciations were intended as jokes and nonsense.
Bpt most modern artists have been concerned
with something radically different from jokes.

Chance plays a significant part in the work of
the French sculptor Jean (or Hans) Arp. His
woodcuts of leaves and other forms, throw n to-
gether at random, were another expression of
the quest for, as he put it, “a secret, primal
meaning slumbering beneath the world of ap-
pearances.” He called them Leaves arranged ac-
cording to the laws of chance and Squares arranged
according to the laws of chance. In these com-
positions it is chance that gives depth to the
work of art; it points to an unknown but active
principle of order and meaning that becomes
manifest in things as their “secret soul."

It was above all the desire to “make chance
essential” (in Paul Klee’s words) that underlay
the surrealists’ efforts to take the grain of wood,
cloud formations, and so on as a starting point
for their visionary painting. Max Ernst, lor
instance, went back to Leonardo da Vinci, who
wrote an essay on Botticelli's remark that if

you throw a paint-soaked sponge at a wall, in
the splashes it makes you will see heads, animals,
landscapes, and a host of other configurations.

Ernst has described how a vision pursued
him in 1925. It forced itself on him as he was
staring at a tiled floor marked by thousands
of scratches. “In order to give foundation to my
powers of meditation and hallucination, I made
a series of drawings of the tiles by laying sheets
of paper on them at random and then taking
graphite rubbings. When I fixed my eyes on the
result, I was astounded by a suddenly sharpened
sense of a hallucinatory series of contrasting and
superposed pictures. I made a collection of the
first results obtained from these Trottages’ and
called it Histoire Naturelle

It is important to note that Ernst placed over
or behind some of' these fruitages a ring or
circle, which gives the picture a peculiar atmo-
sphere and depth. Here the psychologist can
recognize the unconscious drive to oppose the
chaotic hazards of the image’s natural language
by the symbol of a self-contained psychic whole,
thus establishing equilibrium. The ring or circle
dominates the picture. Psychic wholeness rules
nature, itself meaningful and giving meaning.

Right, Roman coins used in places
progressively farther away from Rome.
On the last com (farthest from the
controlling center) the face has dis-
integrated. This strangely corresponds
to the psychic disintegration that
such drugs as LSD 25 can induce.
Below, drawings done by an artist
who took this drug in a test held in
Germany in 1 951 . The drawings grow
more abstract as conscious control
is overcome by the unconscious.

259

In Max Ernst's efforts to pursue the secret
pattern in things, we may detect an affinity
with the 19th-century Romantics. They spoke
of nature's “handwriting," which can be seen
everywhere, on wings, eggshells, in clouds,
snow, ice crystals, and other “strange conjunc-
tions of chance" just as much as in dreams or
visions. They saw everything as the expression
of one and the same “pictorial language of
nature." Thus it was a genuinely romantic ges-
ture when Max Ernst called the pictures pro-
duced by his experiments “natural history."
And he was right, for the unconscious (which
had conjured up the pictures in the chance
configuration of things) is nature.

It is with Ernst's Natural History or Arp’s
compositions of chance that the reflections of
the psychologist begin. He is faced with the
question of what meaning a chance arrange-
ment — wherever and whenever it comes about
— can have for the man who happens on it.
With this question, man and consciousness
come into the matter, and with them the possi-
bility of meaning.

The chance-created picture may be beautiful
or ugly, harmonious or discordant, rich or poor
in content, well- or ill-painted. These factors
determine its artistic value, but they cannot
satisfy the psychologist (often to the distress of
the artist or of anyone who finds supreme satis-
faction in the contemplation of form). The psy-
chologist seeks further and tries to understand
the “secret code" of chance arrangement — in
so far as man can decipher it at all. The num-
ber and form of the objects thrown together at
random by Arp raise as many questions as any

detail of Ernst's fantastic jro/tages. For the psy-
chologist, they are symbols; and therefore they
can not only be felt but (up to a certain point)
can also be interpreted.

The apparent or actual retreat of man from
many modern works ofart, the lack of reflection,
and the predominance of the unconscious over
consciousness offer critics frequent points of
attack. They speak of pathological art or com-
pare it with pictures by the insane, for it is
characteristic of psychosis that consciousness
and the ego-personality are submerged and
“drowned" by floods of contents from the un-
conscious regions of the psyche.

It is true that the comparison is not so odious
today as it was even a generation ago. When
Dr. Jung first pointed out a connection of this
kind in his essay on Picasso (1932), it provoked
a storm of indignation. Today, the catalogue ol
a well-known Zurich art gallery speaks of the
“almost schizophrenic obsession" of a famous
artist, and the German writer Rudolf Kassner
described Georg Trakl as “one of the greatest
German poets/’ continuing : “There was some-
thing schizophrenic about him. It can be felt in
his work ; there is a touch of schizophrenia in it
too. Yes, Trakl is a great poet."

It is now realized that a state of schizo-
phrenia and the artistic vision are not mutually
exclusive. To my mind, the famous experiments
with mescalin and similar drugs have contri-
buted to this change of attitude. These drugs
create a condition accompanied by intense
visions of colors and forms — not unlike schizo-
phrenia. More than one artist of today has
sought inspiration in such a drug.

The retreat from reality

Franz Marc once said : “The art that is coming
will give formal expression to our scientific con-
viction/' This was a truly prophetic saying.
We have traced the influence on artists of
Freud s psychoanalysis and of the discovery (or
rediscovery) of the unconscious in the early
years of the 20th century. Another important
point is the connection between modern art and
the results of research in nuclear physics.

To put it in simple, nonscientific terms, nu-
clear physics has robbed the basic units of
matter of their absolute concreteness. It has
made matter mysterious. Paradoxically, mass
and energy, wave and particle 1 , have proved to
be interchangeable. The laws of cause and
effect have become valid only up to a certain
point. It does not matter at all that these rela-
tivities, discontinuities, and paradoxes hold
good only on the margins of our world only
for the infinitely small (the atom) and the in-
finitely great (the cosmos). They have caused
a revolutionary change in the concept of re-
ality, for a new, totally different, and irrational
reality has dawned behind the reality of our
“natural" world, which is ruled by the laws of
classical physics.

Corresponding relativities and paradoxes
were discovered in the domain of the psyche.
Here, too, another world dawned on the mar-
gin of the world of consciousness, governed by
new and hitherto unknown laws that are

strangely akin to the laws of nuclear physics.
The parallelism between nuclear physics and
the psychology of the collective unconscious
was often a subject of discussion between Jung
and Wolfgang Pauli, the Xobel prizewinner in
ph ysics. The space-time continuum of physics
and the collective unconscious can be seen, so
to speak, as the outer and inner aspects of one
and the same reality behind appearances. (The
relationship between physics and psychology
will be discussed by Dr. M.-L. von Franz in
her concluding essay. ]

It is characteristic of this one world behind
the worlds of physics and the psyche that its
laws, processes, and contents are unimaginable.
That is a fact of outstanding importance for
the understanding of the art of our time. For
the main subject of modern art is, in a certain
sense, unimaginable too. Therefore much mod-
ern art has become “abstract/' The great artists
of this century have sought to give visible form
to the “life behind things" and so their works
are a symbolic expression of a world behind

The paintings on these pages, all
by Franz Marc (1 880-1 91 6), show
his gradual development away from
a concern with outward things, toward
a more completely 'abstract" art,

Far left, Blue Horses (1 91 1 );
center, Roes in a Wood (1 91 3-1 4);
below, Play of Forms (1 91 4),

Painting No. 1, 1926 Collection. The Museum of
Modern Art, New York

Left, Piet Mondrian's Painting
No 7— an example of the modern
approach to "pure form" (Mondrian's
term) through the use of wholly
abstract, geometrical shapes.

The art of Paul Klee is a visual
exploration and expression of the
spirit in and behind nature — the
unconscious or. as he termed it, the
‘‘secretly perceived ' Sometimes
his vision can be disturbing and
demonic, as in his Death and Fire,
right; or it can be a more poetic
kind of fantasy, as in his Sinbad
the Saiior (far right).

consciousness (or, indeed, behind dreams, for
dreams are only rarely non-figurative). Thus
they point to the “one’' reality, the “one” life,
which seems to be the common background of
the two domains of physical and psychic
appearances.

Only a few artists realized the connection be-
tween their form of expression and physics and
psychology. Kandinsky is one of the masters who
expressed the deep emotion he felt at the early
discoveries of modern physical research. "In
my mind, the collapse of the atom was the
collapse of the whole world : Suddenly the
stoutest walls fell. Everything turned unstable,
insecure, and soft. I would not have been sur-
prised if a stone had melted into thin air before
my eyes. Science seemed to have been annihi-
lated.” What resulted from this disillusion was
the artist’s withdrawal from the “realm of
nature,” from the “populous foreground of
things.” “It seemed,” Kandinsky added, “as if
I saw art steadily disengaging itself from
nature.”

This separation from the world of things
happened more or less at the same time to
other artists, too. Franz Marc wrote: “Have
we not learned from a thousand years of ex-
perience that things cease to speak the more
we hold up to them the visual mirror of their
appearance? Appearance is eternally flat
For Marc, the goal of art was “to reveal un-
earthly life dwelling behind everything, to
break the mirror of life so that we may look
being in the face.” Paul Klee wrote: “The
artist does not ascribe to the natural form of

appearance the same convincing significance as
the realists who are his critics. He does not feel
so intimately bound to that reality, because he
cannot see in the formal products of nature the
essence of the creative process. He is more con-
cerned with formative powers than with formal
products." Piet Mondrian accused cubism of
not having pursued abstraction to its logical
end, "the expression of pure reality.” That can
only be attained by the “creation of pure form,”
unconditioned by subjective feelings and ideas.
"Behind changing natural forms there lies
changeless pure reality.”

A great number of artists were seeking to
get past appearances into the “reality” of the
background or the “spirit in matter” by a trans-
mutation of things— through fantasy, surreal-
ism, dream pictures, the use of chance, etc. The
"abstract" artists, however, turned their backs
on things. Their paintings contained no identi-
fiable concrete objects; they were, in Mon-
drian's words, simply “pure form.”

But it must be realized that what these artists
were concerned with was something far greater
than a problem of form and the distinction
between "concrete” and “abstract,” figurative
and non-figurative. Their goal was the center
of life and things, their changeless background,
and an inward certitude. Art had become
mysticism.

The spirit in whose mystery art was sub-
merged was an earthly spirit, which the medi-
eval alchemists had called Mercurius. He is a
symbol of the spirit that these artists divined or
sought behind nature and things, “behind the

appearance of nature.” Their mysticism was
alien to Christianity, for that “Mercurial”
spirit is alien to a “heavenly” spirit. Indeed, it
was Christianity’s dark adversary that was forg-
ing its way in art. Here we begin to see the
real historical and symbolic significance of
“modern art.” Like the hermetic movements in
the Middle Ages, it must be understood as a
mysticism of the spirit of earth, and therefore as
an expression of our time compensatory to
Christianity.

No artist sensed this mystic background of
art more clearly or spoke of it with greater
passion than Kandinsky. The importance of the
great works of art of all time did not lie, in his
eyes, “on the surface, in externals, but in the
root of all roots — in the mystical content of
art.” Therefore he says: “The artist’s eye
should always be turned in upon his inner life,
and his ear should be always alert for the voice
of inward necessity. This is the only way of
giving expression to what the mystic vision
commands.”

Kandinsky called his pictures a spiritual ex-
pression of the cosmos, a music of the spheres,
a harmony of colors and forms. “Form, even
if it is quite abstract and geometrical, has an
inward clang; it is a spiritual being with effects
that coincide absolutely with that form.” “The
impact of the acute angle of a triangle on a
circle is actually as overwhelming in effect as
the finger of God touching the finger of Adam
in Michelangelo.”

In 1914, Franz Marc wrote in his Aphor-
isms: “Matter is a thing that man can at best

tolerate ; he refuses to recognize it. The contem-
plation of the world has become the penetration
of the world. There is no mystic who, in his
moments of sublimest rapture, ever attained
the perfect abstraction of modern thought, or
took his soundings with a deeper plummet.'’

Paul Klee, who may be regarded as the poet
among modern painters, says: “It is the artist’s
mission to penetrate as far as may be toward
that secret ground where primal law feeds
growth. Which artist would not wish to dwell
at the central organ of all motion in space-time
(be it the brain or the heart of creation) from
which all functions derive their life? In the
womb of nature, in the primal ground of crea-
tion, where the secret key to all things lies
hidden? . . . Our beating heart drives us down-
ward, far down to the primal ground.” What is
encountered on this journey “must be taken
most seriously when it is perfectly fused -with
the appropriate artistic means in visible form,”
because, as Klee adds, it is not a question of
merely reproducing what is seen; “the secretly
perceived is made visible.” Klee’s work is rooted
in that primal ground. “My hand is entirely the
instrument of a more distant sphere. Nor is it
my head that functions in my work; it is some-
thing else . . . In his work the spirit of’na-
ture and the spirit of the unconscious became
inseparable. They have drawn him and draw
us, the onlookers, into their magic circle.

Klee’s work is the most complex expression
— now poetic, now demonic— of the chthonic
spirit. Humor and bizarre ideas build a bridge
from the realm of the dark underworld to the

263

human world; the bond between his fantasy
and the earth is the careful observation of the
laws of' nature and the love for all creatures.
“For the artist," he once wrote, “the dialogue
with nature is the conditio sine qua non of his
work."

A different expression of the hidden uncon-
scious spirit can be found in one of' the most
notable of the younger “abstract" painters,
Jackson Pollock, an American who was killed
in a car accident when he was 44. His work
has had a great influence on the younger artists
of our time. In My Painting , he revealed that
he painted in a kind of trance: “When I am
in my painting I am not aware of what I am
doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted'
period that I see what I have been about. I
have no fears about making changes, destroy-
ing the image, etc., because the painting has a
life of its own. I try to let it come through. It
is only when I lose contact with the painting
that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is
pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the
painting comes out well."

Pollock's pictures, which were painted prac-
tically unconsciously, are charged with bound-
less emotional vehemence. In their lack of
structure they are almost chaotic, a glowing
lava stream of colors, lines, planes, and points.
They may be regarded as a parallel to what the
alchemists called the massa confusa , the prinia

materia , or chaos— all ways of' defining the
precious prime matter of the alchemical pro-
cess, the starting point of the quest for the
essence of being. Pollock's pictures represent
the nothing that is everything- that is, the un-
conscious itself. They seem to live in a time
before the emergence of consciousness and be-
ing, or to be fantastic landscapes of a time
after the extinction of consciousness and being.

In the middle of our century, the purely ab-
stract picture without any regular order of
forms and colors has become the most frequent
expression in painting. The deeper the dissolu-
tion of “reality," the more the picture loses its
symbolic content. The reason for this lies in the
nature of the symbol and its function. The sym-
bol is an object of the known world hinting at
something unknown; it is the known expressing
the life and sense of the inexpressible. But in
merely abstract paintings, the world of Un-
known has completely vanished. Nothing is left
to form a bridge to the unknown.

On the other hand, these paintings reveal an
unexpected background, a hidden sense. They
often turn out to be more or less exact images
of' nature itself, showing an astounding simi-
larity with the molecular structure of organic
and inorganic elements of nature. This is a per-
plexing fact. Pure abstraction has become an
image of concrete nature. But Jung may give
us the key to understanding:

wm

"The deeper layers of the psyche/ 1 he has
said, "lose their individual uniqueness as they
retreat farther and farther into darkness. 'Lower
down/ that is to say, as they approach the auto-
nomous functional systems, they become in-
creasingly collective until they are universalized
and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e.
in chemical substances. The body's carbon is
simply carbon. Hence k at bottom' the psyche is
simply ‘world.' "

A comparison of abstract paintings and
microphotographs shows that utter abstraction
of imaginative art has in a secret and surpris-
ing way become "naturalistic," its subject be-
ing elements of matter. The "great abstraction"
and the "great realism," which parted at the
beginning of our century, have come together
again. We remember Kandinsky's words : "The
poles open two paths, which both lead to one
goal at the end." This "goal," the point of
union, is reached in modern abstract paintings.
But it is attained completely unconsciously. The
artist’s intention plays no part in the process.

This point leads to a most important fact
about modern art: The artist is, as it were, not
so free in his creative work as he may think he
is. If his work is performed in a more or less
unconscious way, it is controlled bv laws of
nature that, on the deepest level, correspond to
the laws of the psyche, and vice versa.

The great pioneers of modern art gave clear-

f i

est expression to its true aims and to the' depths
lrom which the spirit rose that left its imprint
on them. T his point is important, though later
artists, who may have failed to realize it, did
not always plumb the same depths. Yet neither
Kandinsky, nor Klee, nor any other of the early
masters of modern painting, was ever aware of
the grave psychological danger he was under-
going with the mystical submersion in the
chthonic spirit and the primal ground of nature.
That danger must now be explained.

As a starting point we may take another
aspect ol abstract art. The German writer Wil-
helm Worringer interpreted abstract art as the
expression of a metaphysical unease and anx-
iety that seemed to him to be more pronounced
among northern peoples. As he explained, they

suffer from reality. The naturalness ol' the
southern peoples is denied to them and they
long for a super-real and super-sensual world
to which they give expression in imaginative or
abstract art.

But, as Sir Herbert Read remarks in his
Concise History of Modern Art , metaphysical
anxiety is no longer only Germanic and north-
ern; it now characterizes the whole of the mod-
ern world. Read quotes Klee, who wrote in
his Diary at the beginning of 1915: "The more
horrifying this world becomes (as it is in these
days) the more art becomes abstract; while a
world at peace produces realistic art." To Franz
Marc, abstraction offered a refuge from the
evil and ugliness in this world. "Very early in
life I felt that man was ugly. The animals
seemed to be more lovely and pure, yet even
among them 1 discovered so much that was re-
volting and hideous that my painting became
more and more schematic and abstract."

A good deal may be learned from a conver-
sation that took place in 1958 between the
Italian sculptor Marino Marini and the writer
Edouard Roditi. The dominant subject that
Marini treated for years in many variations is
the nude figure of a youth on a horse. In the
early versions, which he described in the con-
versation as "symbols of hope and gratitude
(after the end of the Second World War), the
rider sits his horse with outstretched arms, his

The paintings of Jackson Pollock
(left, his /Vo 23) were painted in
a trance (unconsciously) as are the
works of other modern artists— such
asthe French "action" painter Georges
Mathieu (far left). The chaotic but
powerful result may be compared to
the massa confusa of alchemy, and
strangely resembles the hitherto
hidden forms of matter as revealed
in microphotographs (see p. 22).

Right, a similar configuration:
a vibration pattern made by sound
waves in glycerine.

body bending slightly backward. In the course
of years the treatment of the subject became
more “abstract." The more or less “classical”
form of the rider gradually dissolved.

Speaking of the feeling underlying this
change, Marini said: “If you look at my
equestrian statues of the last 12 years in order
of time, you will notice that the animal's panic
steadily increases, but that it is frozen with
terror and stands paralyzed rather than rear-
ing or taking flight. That is all because I be-
lieve that we are approaching the end of the
world. In every figure, I strove to express a
deepening fear and despair. In this way I am
attempting to symbolize the last stage of a
dying myth, the myth of the individual, vic-
torious hero, of the humanist's man of virtue."

In fairy tale and myth, the “victorious hero"
is a symbol of consciousness. His defeat, as
Marini says himself, means the death of the
individual, a phenomenon that appears in a
social context as the submergence of the indi-
vidual in the mass, and in art as the decline of
the human element.

When Roditi asked whether Marini's style
was abandoning the classical canon on its way
to becoming “abstract,'’ Marini replied, “As
soon as art has to express fear, it must of
itself depart from the classical ideal." He found
subjects for his work in the bodies excavated
at Pompeii. Roditi called Marini’s art a “Hiro-
shima style," for it conjures up visions of the
end of a world. Marini admitted it. He felt,
he said, as if he had been expelled from an
earthly paradise. “Until recently, the sculptor
aimed at full sensual and powerful^ forms. But
for the last 15 years, sculpture prefers forms in
disintegration."

The conversation between Marini and Roditi
explains the transformation of “sensory" art into
abstraction that should be clear to anyone who
has ever walked open-eyed through an exhibi-
tion of modern art. However much he may
appreciate or admire its formal qualities, he
can scarcely fail to sense the fear, despair, ag-
gression, and mockery that sounds like a cry
from many works. The “metaphysical anxiety"
that is expressed by the distress in these pictures

266

and sculptures may have arisen from the des-
pair of a doomed world, as it did with Marini.
In other cases, the emphasis may lie on the
religious factor, on the feeling that God is dead.
There is a close connection between the two.

At the root of this inner distress lies the de-
feat (or rather the retreat) of consciousness. In
the upsurge of mystical experience, everything
that once bound man to the human world, to
earth, to time and space, to matter and the
natural living of life, has been cast aside or
dissolved. But unless the unconscious is bal-
anced by the experience of consciousness, it
will implacably reveal its contrary or negative
aspect. The wealth of creative sound that made
the harmony of the spheres, or the wonderful
mysteries of the primal ground, have yielded to
destruction and despair. In more than one case
the artist has become the passive victim of the
unconscious.

In physics, too, the world of the background
has revealed its paradoxical nature; the laws
of the inmost elements of nature, the newly
discovered structures and relations in its basic
unit, the atom, have become the scientific foun-
dation for unprecedented weapons of destruc-
tion, and opened the way to annihilation.
Ultimate knowledge and the destruction of the
world are the two aspects of the discovery of
the primal ground of nature.

Jung, who was as familiar with the danger-
ous dual nature of the unconscious as with the

Top left and center, two sculptures
by Marino Marini (1 901 -66), from
1 945 and 1 951 respectively, show
how the theme of horse and rider
was altered from an expression of
tranquility to one of tortured fear
and despair, while the sculptures
themselves grew correspondingly
more and more abstract. Marini's later
work was influenced by the equally
panic-stricken shapes of bodies
found at Pompeii (left).

importance of human consciousness, could
offer mankind only one weapon against cata-
strophe: the call for individual consciousness,
which seems so simple and yet is so arduous.
Consciousness is not only indispensable as a
counterpoise to the unconscious, and not only
gives the possibility of meaning to life. It has
also an eminently practical function. The evil
witnessed in the world outside, in neighbors or
neighboring peoples, can be made conscious as
evil contents of our own psyche as well, and
this insight would be the first step to a radical
change in our attitude to our neighbors.

Envy, lust, sensuality, lies, and all known
vices are the negative, “dark” aspect of the un-
conscious, which can manifest itself in two
ways. In the positive sense, it appears as a
“spirit of nature, 55 creatively animating man,
things, and the world. It is the “chthonic
spirit” that has been mentioned so often in this
chapter. In the negative sense, the unconscious
(that same spirit) manifests itself as a spirit of
evil, as a drive to destroy.

As has already been pointed out, the alche-
mists personified this spirit as “the spirit Mercu-
rius” and called it, with good reason, Mercurius
duplex (the two-faced, dual Mercurius). In the
religious language of Christianity, it is called
the devil. But, however improbable it may
seem, the devil too has a dual aspect. In the
positive sense, he appears as Lucifer — literally,
the light-bringer.

Looked at in the light of these difficult and
paradoxical ideas, modern art (which we have
recognized as symbolic of the chthonic spirit)
also has a dual aspect. In the positive sense it
is the expression of a mysteriously profound
nature-mysticism; in the negative, it can only
be interpreted as the expression of an evil* or
destructive spirit. The two sides belong to-
gether, for the paradox is one of the basic
qualities of the unconscious and its contents.

To prevent any misunderstanding, it must
once more be emphasized that these considera-
tions have nothing to do with artistic and
aesthetic values, but are solely concerned with
the interpretation of modern art as a symbol of
our time.

267

Union of opposites

There is one more point to be made. The
spirit of the age is in constant movement. It is
like a river that flows on, invisibly but surely,
and given the momentum of life in our century,
even 10 years is a long time.

About the middle of this century a change
began to come over painting. It was nothing
revolutionary, nothing like the change that
happened about 1910, which meant the recon-
struction of art to its very foundations. But
there were groups of artists who formulated
their aims in ways not heard before. This trans-
formation is going on within the frontiers of
abstract painting.

The representation of concrete reality, which
springs from the primal human need of catch-
ing the passing moment on the wing, has be-
come a truly concrete sensuous art in the photo-
graphy of such men as France’s Henri Cartier-
Bresson, Switzerland’s Werner Bischof, and
others. We can therefore understand why artists
continued on their own way of inwardness and
imagination. For a good many of the young
artists, however, abstract art as it had been
practiced for many years offered no adventure,
no field of conquest. Seeking the new', they
found it in what lay nearest, yet had been lost

in nature and man. They were not and are
not concerned with the reproduction of nature
in pictures, but with the expression of their own
emotional experience of nature.

The French painter Alfred Manessier defined
the aims of his art in these words: “What we
have to reconquer is the weight of lost reality.
We must make for ourselves a new heart, a new
spirit, a new soul, in the measure of man. The
painter’s true reality lies neither in abstraction
nor in realism, but in the reconquest of his
weight as a human being. At present non-fig-
urative art seems to me to offer the one oppor-
tunity for the painter to approach the inward
reality of himself and to grasp the consciousness
of his essential self, or even of his being. It is

268

only by the rcconquest of his position, I believe,
that the painter will be able, in the time to
come, to return slowly to himself, to rediscover
his own weight and so to strengthen it that it
can even reach the outward reality of the
world.’ 1

Jean Bazaine speaks in similar terms: “It is
a great temptation for the painter of today to
paint the pure rhythm of his feeling, the most
secret pulse of his heart, instead of embodying
it in a concrete form. That, however, leads only
to a desiccated mathematics or a kind of ab-
stract expressionism, which ends in monotony
and a progressive impoverishment of form. . . .
But a form that can reconcile man with his
world is an 'art of communion' by which man,
at any moment, can recognize his own un-
formed countenance in the world."

What in fact artists now have at heart is a
conscious reunion of their own inward reality
with the reality of the world or of nature; or,
in the last resort, a new union of body and soul,
matter and spirit. That is their way to the “re-
conquest of their weight as human beings.”
Only now is the great rift that set in with
modern art (between “great abstraction" and
"great realism”) being made conscious and on
the way to being healed.

For the onlooker, this first becomes evident
in the changed atmosphere in the works of these
artists. There radiates from the pictures of such
artists as Alfred Manessier or the Belgian-born
painter Gustave Singier, in spite of all abstrac-
tion, a belief in the world, and, in spite of all
intensity of feeling, a harmony of forms and
colors that often attains serenity. In the French
painter Jean Lur^at’s famous tapestries of the

In this century the depiction of
actuality — once the province of
the painter and sculptor — has been
taken over by the photographer,
whose camera can not only record
but (like any landscape painting
of past centuries) can express the
photographer's own emotional
experience of the subject. Right, a
Japanese scene photographed
by Werner Bischof (1 91 6-54).

1950s the exuberance of nature pervades the
picture. His art could be called sensuous as well
as imaginative.

We find a serene harmony of forms and col-
ors also in the work of Paul Klee. This har-
mony was what he had always been striving
for. Above all, he had realized the necessity
of not denying evil. “Even evil must not be a
triumphant or degrading enemy, but a power
collaborating in the whole.” But Klee’s starting
point was not the same. He lived near “the
dead and the unborn” at an almost cosmic dis-
tance from this world, while the younger gen-
eration of painters can be said to be more
firmly rooted in earth.

An important point to notice is that modern
painting, just when it has advanced far enough
to discern the union of the opposites, has taken
up religious themes. The “metaphysical void”
seems to have been overcome. And the utterly
unexpected has happened : The Church has be-
come a patron of modern art. We need only
mention here All Saints at Basle, with windows
by Alfred Manessier; Assy church, with pic-
tures by a large number of modern artists; the
Matisse chapel at Vence; and the church at
Audincourt, which has works by Jean Bazaine
and the French artist Fernand Leger.

The admission of modern art to the Church
means more than an act of broadmindedness

on the part of its patrons. It is symbolic of the
fact that the part played by modern art in re-
lation to Christianity is changing. The compen-
satory function of the old hermetic movements
has made way for the possibility of collabora-
tion. In discussing the animal symbols of Christ,
it was pointed out that the light and the chtho-
nic spirits belonged to each other. It seems as
if the moment had come today when a new
stage in the solution of this millennial problem
might be reached.

What the future will yield we cannot know —
whether the bridging of the opposites will give
positive results, or whether the way will lead
through yet more unimaginable catastrophes.
There is too much anxiety and too much dread
at work in the world, and this is still the pre-
dominant factor in art and society. Above all,
there is still too much unwillingness on the part
of the individual to apply to himself and his
life the conclusions that can be drawn from art,
although he might be ready to accept them in
art. The artist can often express many things,
unconsciously and without awakening hostility,
which are resented when they are expressed by a
psychologist (a fact that could be demonstrated
even more conclusively in literature than in the
visual arts) . Confronted by the statements of the
psychologist, the individual feels directly chal-
lenged; but what the artist has to say, particu-

270

larly in our century, usually remains in an
impersonal sphere.

And yet it seems important that the sug-
gestion of a more whole, and therefore more
human, form of expression should have be-
come visible in our time. It is a glimmer of
hope, symbolized for me (at the time of writ-
ing: 1961) by a number of paintings by the
French artist Pierre Soulages. Behind a cataract
of huge, black rafters there glimmers a clear,
pure blue or a radiant yellow. Light is dawn-
ing behind darkness.

Mid-20th-century art seems to be
moving away from a Marini - 1 ike
despair — as is seen in the gesture
of Jean Lurcat, who exhibited his
work in a field (top left), a link
with nature and the earth. Above,
Dedicace a Sainte Marie Madeleine
by Alfred Manessier {born 1911).
Top right, Pour la Naissance du
Surhomme by France's Pierre-Yves
Tremois (born 1 921 ). Both works
indicate a tendency toward life and
wholeness. The painting, right, by
Pierre Soulages (born 1 91 9) might
be understood as a symbol of hope:
Behind the cataclysmic darkness
can be seen a glimmer of light.

5 Symbols in an individual analysis

Jolande Jacobi

A 1 7th-century engraving of "The Palace of Dreams."

Symbols in an individual analysis

The beginning of the analysis

There is a widespread belief that the methods
of Jungian psychology are applicable only to
middle-aged people. True, many men and
women reach middle age without achieving
psychological maturity, and it is therefore
necessary to help them through the neglected
phases of their development. They have not
completed the first part of the process of indi-
viduation that Dr. M.-L. von Franz has de-
scribed. But it is also true that a young person
can encounter serious problems as he grows up.
If a young person is afraid of life and finds it
hard to adjust to reality, he might prefer to
dwell in his fantasies or to remain a child. In
such a young person (especially if he is intro-
verted) one can sometimes discover unexpected
treasures in the unconscious, and by bringing
them into consciousness strengthen his ego and
give him the psychic energy he needs to grow
into a mature person. That is the function of
the powerful symbolism of our dreams.

Other contributors to this book have de-
scribed the nature of these symbols and the role
they play in man’s psychological nature. I wish
to show how analysis can aid the individuation
process by taking the example of a young en-
gineer, aged 25, whom I shall call Henry.

Henry came from a rural district in eastern
Switzerland. His father, of Protestant peasant
stock, was a general practitioner: Henry de-
scribed him as a man with high moral standards,
but a rather withdrawn person who found it
difficult to relate to other people. He was more
of a father to his patients than to his children.
At home, Henry’s mother was the dominant
personality. “Wc were raised by the strong
hand of our mother,” he said on one occasion.
She came from a family with an academic
background and wide artistic interests. She her-
self, in spite of her strictness, had a broad spiri-
tual horizon; she was impulsive and romantic
(she had a great love for Italy). Though she was
by birth a Catholic, her children had been

brought up in the Protestantism of their father.
Henry had a sister, older than himself, with
whom he had a good relationship.

Henry was introverted, shy, finely drawn,
and very tall, with light hair, a high pale fore-
head, and blue eyes with dark shadows. He did
not think that neurosis (the most usual reason)
had brought him to me, but rather an inner
urge to work on his psyche. A strong mother-
tie, however, and a fear of committing himself
to life were hidden behind this urge; but these
were only discovered during the analytical work
with me. He had just completed his studies and
taken a position in a large factory, and he was
facing the many problems of a young man on
the threshold of manhood. “It appears to me,”
he wrote in a letter asking for an interview,
“that this phase of my life is particularly im-
portant and meaningful. 1 must decide either
to remain unconscious in a well-protected secu-
rity, or else to venture on a yet unknown way
of which I have great hopes.” The choice thus
confronting him was whether to remain a
lonely, vacillating, and unrealistic youth or to
become a self-sufficient and responsible adult.

Henry told me that he preferred books to
society; he felt inhibited among people, and
was often tormented by doubts and self-criti-
cism. He was well read for his age and had a
leaning toward aesthetic intellectualism. After
an earlier atheistic stage, he became rigorously
Protestant, but finally his religious attitude
became completely neutral. He had chosen a
technical education because he felt his talents
lay in mathematics and geometry. He possessed
a logical mind, trained in the natural sciences,
but he also had a propensity toward the irra-
tional and mystical that he did not want to
admit even to himself.

About two years before his analysis began,
Henry had become engaged to a Catholic girl
from the French part of Switzerland. He de-
scribed her as charming, efficient, and full of

274

initiative. Nevertheless, he was uncertain
whether he should undertake the responsibility
of marriage. Since he had so little acquaintance
with girls, he thought it might be better to wait,
or even to remain a bachelor dedicated to a
scholarly life. His doubts were strong enough
to prevent his reaching a decision; he needed
a further step toward maturity before he could
feel sure of himself .

Although qualities of both' his parents were
combined in Henry, he was markedly mother-
bound. In his consciousness, 'he was identified
with his real (or “light”) mother, who repre-
sented high ideals and intellectual ambitions.
But in his unconscious he was deeply in the
power of the dark aspects of his mother-bound
condition. His unconscious still held his ego in
a strangle-hold. All his clear-cut thinking and
his efforts to find a firm standpoint in the
purely rational remained nothing more than an
intellectual exercise.

The need to escape from this “mother-
prison" was expressed in hostile reactions to his
real mother and a rejection of the “inner
mother" as a symbol of the feminine side of the
unconscious. But an inner power sought to
hold him back in the condition of childhood,
resisting everything that attracted him to the
outside world. Even the attractions of his
fiancee were not enough to free him from his
mother-ties, and thus help him find himself. He

was not aware that his inner urge for growth
(which he felt strongly] included the need to
detach himself from his mother.

My analytical work with Henry lasted nine
months. Altogether, there were 35 sessions in
which he presented 50 dreams. So short an
analysis is rare. It is only possible when energy-
laden dreams like Henry’s speed up the process
of development. Of course, from the Jungian
point of view, there is no rule for the length of
time required for a successful analysis. All de-
pends on the individual’s readiness to realize
inner facts and on the material presented by
his unconscious.

Like most introverts, Henry led a rather
monotonous outer life. During the day he was
completely involved in his job. In the evenings
he sometimes went out with his fiancee or with
friends, with whom he liked to have literary
discussions. Quite often he sat in his lodgings
absorbed in a book or in his own thoughts.
Though we regularly discussed the happenings
of his daily life, and also his childhood and
youth, we usually got fairly quickly to the in-
vestigation of his dreams and the problems his
inner life presented to him. It was extraordi-
nary to see how strongly his dreams emphasized
his “call" to spiritual development.

But I must make it clear that not everything
described here was told to Henry. In analysis
one must always remain conscious of how ex-

Left, the palace and monastery of
Escorial, Spain, built by Philip II
about 1 563. Its fortress structure
images the introvert's withdrawal
from the world Below, a drawing by
Henry of a barn he built asa child
with fortress-like battlements.

plosive the dreamer's dream symbols may be
for him. The analyst can hardly be too careful
and reserved. If too bright a light is thrown on
the dream-language of symbols, the dreamer
can be driven into anxiety, and thus led into
rationalization as a defense mechanism. Or he
can no longer assimilate them, and can fall into
a severe psychic crisis. Also, the dreams re-
ported and commented on here are by no
means all the dreams that Henry had during
his analysis. 1 can discuss only an important
few that influenced his development.

In the beginning of our work, childhood
memories with important symbolic meanings
came up. The oldest dated back to Henry’s
fourth year. He said: “One morning I was
allowed to go with my mother to the baker’s
shop and there I received a crescent roll from
the baker's wife. I did not eat the roll but
carried it proudly in my hand. Only my mother
and the baker's wife were present, so I was the
only man.” Such crescents are popularly called
“moon-teeth,'’ and this symbolic allusion to the
moon underlines the dominating power of the
1'eminine -a power to which the little boy may
have felt exposed and which, as the “only
man,” he was proud of being able to confront.

Another childhood memory came from his
fifth year. It concerned Henry's sister, who
came home after her examinations at school
and found him constructing a toy barn. The
barn was made with blocks of wood arranged
in the form of a square and surrounded with
a kind of hedge that looked like the battle-
ments of a castle. Henry was pleased with his
achievement, and said teasingly to his sister:
“You have started school but you're already on
holiday." Her reply, that he was on holiday all
year, upset him terribly. He felt deeply hurt
that his “achievement" was not taken seriously.

Even years later Henry had not forgotten
the bitter hurt and injustice that he had felt
when his construction was rejected. His later
problems concerning the assertion of his mas-
culinity and the conflict between rational and
fantasy values are already visible in this early
experience. And these problems are also to be
seen in the images of his first dream.

276

The initial dream

The day after Henry’s first visit to me, he had
the following dream :

I was on an excursion with a group of people
I did not know. We were going to the Zinalrot-
horn. We had started from Samaden. We only
walked about an hour because we were to camp
and have some theatricals. I was not given an
active part. I especially remember one performer
— a young woman in a pathetic role wearing a long
flowing robe.

It was midday and I wanted to go on to the
pass. As all the others preferred to remain, I went
up alone, leaving my equipment behind. How-
ever, I found myself right back in the valley and
completely lost my orientation. I wanted to re-
turn to my party but did not know which moun-
tainside I should climb. I was hesitant about ask-
ing. Finally, an old woman showed me the way
I must go.

Then I ascended from a different starting
point than our group had used in the morning.
It was a matter of making a turn at the right
altitude and then following the mountain slope
to return to the party. I climbed 'along a cog-
wheel mountain railway on the right side. On my
left little cars constantly passed me, each con-
taining one hidden bloated little man in a blue
suit. It is said they are dead. I was afraid of other
cars coming from behind and kept turning around
to look, so as not to be run over. My anxiety was
needless.

At the point where I had to turn off. to the
right, there were people awaiting me. They took
me to an inn. A cloudburst came up. I regretted
that my equipment -my rucksack, and my motor
bike — were not there, but I was told not to get
them till next morning. I accepted the advice.

One of Henry's childhood memories
involved a crescent roll, which he
drew (top left). Center, the same
shape on a modern Swiss bakery sign.
The crescent shape has long been
linked with the moon and thus with
the feminine principle, as in the
crown (left) of the goddess Ishtar
of third century b.c. Babylon.

Dr. Jung assigned great importance to the
first dream in an analysis, for, according to
him, it often has anticipatory value. A deci-
sion to go into analysis is usually accompanied
by an emotional upheaval that disturbs the
deep psychic levels from which archetypal sym-
bols arise. The first dreams therefore often
present “collective images” that provide a per-
spective for the analysis as a whole and can
give the therapist insight into the dreamer’s
psychic conflicts.

What does the above dream tell us of Henry’s
future development? We must first examine
some of the associations that Henry himself sup-
plied. The village of Samaden had been the
home of Jiirg Jenatsch, a famous 17th-century
Swiss freedom-fighter. The “theatricals” called
up the thought of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters
Lehrjahre , which Henry liked very much. In
the woman he saw a resemblance to the figure
in a painting called The Island of the Dead by
the 19th-century Swiss artist Arnold Bocklin.
The “wise old woman,” as he called her,
seemed to be associated on the one hand to
his analyst, on the other to the charwoman in
J. B. Priestley’s play They Came to a City. The
cog-wheel railway reminded him of the barn
(with battlements) that he had built as a child.

The dream describes an “excursion” (a sort
of “walking tour”), which is a striking parallel
to Henry’s decision to undertake analysis. The
individuation process is often symbolized by a
voyage of discovery to unknown lands. Such
a voyage takes place in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress , or in Dante’s Divina Commedia . The
“traveler” in Dante’s poem, searching for a
way, comes to a mountain that he decides to
climb. But because of three strange animals (a
motif that will also appear in one of Henry’s
later dreams) he is forced to descend into the
valley and even into hell. (Later he ascends
again to purgatory and finally reaches para-
dise.) From this parallel one could deduce that

277

The initial stage of the process of
individuation can sometimes be a
period of disorientation — as was the
case with Henry Left, the first
woodcut from the 1 5th century book
The Dream of Pol iphilo shows the
dreamer fearfully entering a dark
wood — perhaps representing his
entrance into the unknown.

Associations produced by Henry
to his first dream: right, Island
of the Dead by the 1 9th -century
Swiss artist Arnold Bocklin. Far
right, a scene from the 1 944 London
production of J. B Priestley's They
Came to a City, which concerns the
reactions of a group of people from
many walks of life to an "ideal
city.'' One of the central characters
is a charwoman, left of picture.

there might be a similar period of disorienta-
tion and lonely seeking in store for Henry. The
first part of this life-journey, represented as
climbing a mountain, offers ascent from the
unconscious to an elevated point of view of the
ego — i.e. to an increased consciousness.

Samaden is named as the starting point of
the excursion. This is where Jenatsch (whom
we may take as embodying the ‘'freedom-seek-
ing" sense within Henry’s unconscious) started
his campaign for the liberation of the Veltlin
region of Switzerland from the French.
Jenatsch had other characteristics in common
with Henry: He was a Protestant who fell in
love with a Catholic girl; and, like Henry,
whose analysis was to free him from his mother-
ties and from fear of life, Jenatsch also fought
for liberation. One could interpret this as a
favorable augury for the success of Henry's own
fight for freedom. The goal of the excursion is
the Zinalrothorn, a mountain in western Swit-
zerland that he did not know. The word rot
(“red”) in Zinalro/horn touches on Henry's
emotional problem. Red is usually symbolic of
feeling or passion; here it points to the value
of the feeling-function, which was insufficiently
developed in Henry. And the word “horn"
reminds one of the crescent roll in the baker's
shop of' Henry's childhood.

After a short walk, a halt is called, and
Henry can return to a state of passivity. This

278

also belongs to his nature. The point is under-
lined by the “theatricals.” Attending the theatre
(which is an imitation of real life) is a popular
way of evading an active part in life’s drama.
The spectator can identify with the play, yet
continue to pander to his fantasies. This kind
of identification permitted the Greeks to experi-
ence catharsis, much as the psycho-drama initi-
ated by the American psychiatrist J. L. Moreno
is now used as a therapeutic aid. Some such
process may have enabled Henry to undergo
an inner development when his associations
raised memories of Wilhelm Meisler , Goethe’s
story of the maturing of a young man.

That H enry should have been impressed by
the romantic appearance of a woman is also
not surprising. This figure resembles Henry's
mother and is at the same time a personifica-
tion of his own unconscious feminine side. The
connection Henry makes between her and
Bbcklin's Island of the Dead points to his de-
pressive mood, so well expressed by the painting,
which shows a white-robed priest-like figure
steering a boat bearing a coffin toward an
island. We have here a significant double
paradox: The keel of the boat seems to sug-
gest a contrary course, away from the island;
and the “priest” is a figure of uncertain sex.
In Henry’s associations, this figure is certainly
hermaphroditic. The double paradox coincides
with Henry’s ambivalence: The opposites in

his soul are still too undifferentiated to be
clearly separated.

After this interlude in the dream, Henry
suddenly becomes aware that it is noon and
he must go on. So he again starts for the pass.
A mountain pass is a well-known symbol for a
“situation of transition” that leads from an old
attitude of mind to a new one. Henry must go
alone; it is essential for his ego to surmount
the test unaided. 'Thus he leaves his kit behind
— an action that signifies that his mental equip-
ment has become a burden, or that he must
change his normal way of going about things.

But he does not reach the pass. He loses his
bearings and finds himself back in the valley.
This failure shows that while Henry’s ego de-
cides on activity, his other psychic entities (re-
presented by the other members of the party)
remain in the old state of passivity and refuse
to accompany the ego. (When the dreamer
himself appears in a dream, he usually repre-
sents only his conscious ego; the other figures
stand for his more or less unknown, uncon-
scious qualities.)

Henry is in a situation where he is helpless,
yet ashamed to admit it. At this moment he
meets an old woman who indicates the right
way to him. He can do nothing but accept
her advice. The helpful “old woman” is a
well-known symbol in myths and fairy tales for
the wisdom of the eternal female nature. The

rationalist Henry hesitates to accept her help
because such acceptance requires a sacrificium
intellects a sacrifice, or discarding, of a
rational way of thought. (This demand will
often be made of Henry in later dreams.) Such
a sacrifice is unavoidable; it applies to his
relationship with the analysis as well as with
everyday life.

He associated the figure of the “old woman”
to the charwoman in Priestley’s play about a
new “dream” city (perhaps an analogy to the
New Jersusalem of the Apocalypse) into which
the characters can enter only after a kind of
initiation. Phis association seems to show that
Henry had intuitively recognized this confron-
tation as something decisive for him. The char-
woman in Priestley’s play says that in the city
“they have promised me a room of my own.”
There she will be self-reliant and independent,
as Henry seeks to be.

If such a technically minded young man as
Henry is consciously to choose the way of
psychic development, he must be prepared lor
a reversal of his old attitudes. Therefore, on the
advice of the woman, he must start his climb
from a different spot. Only then will it be pos-
sible for him to judge at what level he must
deviate to reach the group - the other qualities
of his psyche --that he had left behind.

He climbs a cog-wheel railway track (a motif
perhaps reflecting his technical education) and

2 79

keeps to the right side of the track — which is
the conscious side. (In the history of symbolism,
the right side generally represents the realm of
consciousness; the left, the unconscious.) From
the lei t, little cars are coming down, and in
each a little man is hidden. Henry is afraid that
an unnoticed upward-bound car might hit him
from the rear. His anxiety proves groundless,
but it reveals that Henry is afraid of what, so
to speak, lies behind his ego.

The bloated, blue-clothed men might sym-
bolize sterile intellectual thoughts that are be-
ing brought down mechanically. Blue often
denotes the function of thinking. Thus the

men might be symbols of ideas or attitudes that
have died on the intellectual heights where the
air is too thin. They could also represent life-
less inner parts of Henry's psyche.

A comment on these men is made in the
dream: “It is said they are dead." But Henry
is alone. Who makes this statement? It is a
voice — and when a voice is heard in a dream it
is a most meaningful occurrence. Dr. Jung
identified the appearance of a voice in dreams
with an intervention of the Self. It stands for a
knowledge that has its roots in the collective
fundaments of the psyche. What the voice says
cannot be disputed.

The insight Henry has gained about the
“dead" formulas, to which he has been too
committed, marks a turning point in the dream.
He has at last reached the right place for tak-
ing a new direction, to the right (the conscious
direction), toward the conscious and the outer
world. There he finds the people he left behind
waiting for him; and thus he can become con-
scious of previously unknown aspects of his per-
sonality. Since his ego has surmounted the
dangers it confronted alone (an accomplish-
ment that could make him more mature and
stable), he can rejoin the group or “collective"
and get shelter and food.

Then comes the rain, a cloudburst that re-
laxes tension and makes the earth fertile. In
mythology, rain was often thought to be a
“love-union" between heaven and earth. In the
Eleusinian mysteries, for instance, after every-
thing had been purified by water, the call went
up to heaven: “Let it rain!" and down to

Left, the Greek maiden Danae, who
was impregnated by Zeus in the form
of a shower of gold {from a painting
by the 1 6th century Flemish artist
Jan Gossaert) Like Henry's dream,
this myth reflects the symbolism of
the cloudburst as a sacred marriage
between heaven and earth.

In another of Henry's dreams a doe
appears— an image of shy femininity
as is the fawn in the painting,
right, by the 1 9th century British
artist Edwin Landseer.

earth: “Be fruitful !” This was understood as
a sacred marriage of the gods. In this way rain
can be said to represent a “solution" in the
literal sense of the word.

Coming down, Henry again meets the col-
lective values symbolized by the rucksack and
motorcycle. He has passed through a phase in
which he has strengthened his ego-conscious-
ness by proving he can hold his own, and he
has a renewed need for social contact. However,
he accepts the suggestion of his friends that he
should wait and fetch his things the next morn-
ing. Thus he submits for the second time to
advice that comes from elsewhere: the first
time, to the advice of the old woman, to a
subjective power, an archetypal figure; the
second time, to a collective pattern. With this
step Henry has passed a milestone on the road
to maturity.

As an anticipation of the inner development
that Henry could hope to achieve through
analysis, this dream was extraordinarily pro-
mising. The conflicting opposites that kept
Henry's soul in tension were impressively sym-
bolized. On the one hand, there was his con-
scious urge to ascend, and on the other his
tendency to passive contemplation. Also, the
image of the pathetic young woman in her
white robes (representing Henry’s sensitive and
romantic feelings) contrasts with the bloated
corpses in blue suits (representing his sterile in-
tellectual world). However, to overcome these
obstacles and bring about a balance between
them would be possible for Henry only after the
most severe trials.

Fear of the unconscious

The problems we encountered in Henry’s initial
dream showed up in many others — problems
like vacillation between masculine activity and
feminine passivity, or a tendency to hide be-
hind intellectual asceticism. He feared the
world, yet was attracted to it. Fundamentally,
he feared the obligations of marriage, which
demanded that he form a responsible relation-
ship with a woman. Such an ambivalence is
not unusual for someone on the threshold of
manhood. Though in terms of age Henry had
left that phase behind him, his inner maturity
did not match his years. This problem is often
met in the introvert, with his fear of reality and
outer life.

The fourth dream that Henry recounted
provided a striking illustration of his psycho-
logical state:

It seems to me that I have had this dream
endless times. Military service, long-distance race.
Alone I go on my way. I never reach the goal.
Will I be the last? The course is well known to
me, all of it deja vu . The start is in a little wood,
and the ground is covered with dry leaves. The
terrain slopes gently to an idyllic little brook
that invites one to tarry. Later, there is a dusty
country road. It leads toward Hombrechtikon, a
small village near the upper lake of Zurich. A
brook bordered by willows similar to a painting
of Bocklin's in which a dreamy female figure
follows the course of the water. Night falls. In a
village I ask for directions to the road. I am told
the road leads on for seven hours over a pass. I
gather myself together and go on.

However, this time the end of the dream differs.
After the willow-bordered brook I get into a
wood. There I discover a doe that runs away.

I am proud of this observation. The doe has
appeared on the left side and now I turn to the
right. Here I see three strange creatures, hall
pig, half dog, with the legs of a kangaroo. The
faces are quite undifferentiated, with large droop-
ing dog ears. Maybe they are costumed people. As a
boy, I once masqueraded in the circus costume of
a donkey.

28

The beginning of the dream is conspicuously
like Henry's initial dream. A dreamlike female
figure again appears, and the setting of the
dream is associated with another painting
by Bocklin. This painting, called Autumn
Thoughts , and the dry leaves mentioned earlier
in the dream underline the autumnal mood.
A romantic atmosphere also reappears in this
dream. Apparently this inner landscape, repre-
senting Henry's melancholy, is very familiar to
him. Again he is in a collective of people, but
this time with military comrades on a long-
distance race.

This whole situation (as the military service
also suggests) might be regarded as a repre-
sentation of an average man's fate. Henry him-
self said: “It's a symbol of life." But the
dreamer does not want to adjust to it. He goes
on alone - which was probably always the case
with Henry. That is why he has the impres-
sion that everything is deja vu . His thought
(“I never reach the goal") indicates strong feel-
ings of inferiority and a belief that he cannot
win the “long-distance race."

His way leads to Hombrcchtikon, a name
that reminds him of his secret plans to break
away from home {Horn — home, brechen — to
break). But because this breaking away does
not occur, he again (as in the initial dream)
loses his sense of orientation and must ask for
directions.

Dreams compensate more or less explicitly
for the dreamer’s conscious attitude of mind.

The romantic, maidenly figure of Henry's con-
scious ideal is balanced by the appearance of
the strange, female-like animals. Henry's world
of instincts is symbolized by something femi-
nine. The wood is a symbol of an unconscious
area, a dark place where animals live. At first
a doe — a symbol of shy, fugitive, innocent
womanliness — emerges, but only for a moment.
Then Henry sees three mixed-up animals of a
strange and repulsive appearance. They seem
to represent undifferentiated instinctuality — a
sort of confused mass of his instincts, contain-
ing the raw material for a later development.
Their most striking characteristic is that they
are all virtually faceless, and thus without the
slightest glimmerings of consciousness.

In the minds of many people, the pig is
closely associated to dirty sexuality. (Circe,
for example, changed the men who desired her
into swine.) The dog may stand for loyalty,
but also for promiscuity, because it shows no
discrimination in its choice of partners. The
kangaroo, however, is often a symbol for moth-
erliness and tender carrying capacity.

All these animals present only rudimentary
traits, and even these are senselessly contami-
nated. In alchemy, the “prime material" was
often represented by such monstrous and fabu-
lous creatures- mixed forms of animals. In
psychological terms, they would probably sym-
bolize the original total unconsciousness, out
of which the individual ego can rise and begin
to develop toward maturity.

Left, Henry's drawing of the strange
animals of his dream. They are mute
and blind, unable to communicate,
and so represent his unconscious
state The animal on the ground
(which he colored green, the color of
vegetation and nature, and in folk-
lore a symbol of hope) hints at
possibilities of growth and a chance
of differentiation.

1

Henry's fear of tlie monsters becomes evident
by his attempt to make them seem harmless.
He wants to convince himself that they are
only dressed-up people, like himself in a boy-
hood masquerade. His anxiety is natural. A
man discovering such inhuman monsters in his
inner self, as symbols of certain traits of his
unconscious, has every reason to be afraid.

Another dream also shows Henry's fear of
the depths of the unconscious:

I am a cabin boy in a sailing boat. Paradoxi-
cally, the sails are spread, though there is a
complete calm. My task consists of holding a
rope that serves to fasten a mast. Strangely enough,
the railing is a wall covered with stone slabs.
This whole structure lies exactly on the border
between the water and the sailing boat that
floats there alone. I hold fast to the rope (not to
the mast) and I am forbidden to look into the
water.

In this dream Henry is in a psychological
borderline, situation. The railing is a wall that
protects him but at the same time obstructs his
view. He is forbidden to look into the water
(where he might discover unknown powers).
All these images reveal his doubt and fear.

The man who fears the communications of
his inner depths (like Henry) is as much afraid
of the feminine element in himself as he is of
real women. At one moment he is fascinated
by her, at another he tries to escape; fascinated
and terrified, he flees so as not to become her

"prey.’' He does not dare to approach a be-
loved (and therefore idealized) partner with
his animal-like sexuality.

As a typical result of his mother-tie, Henry
had difficulty in giving both feeling and sensu-
ality to the same woman. Again and again his
dreams brought proof of his desire to free him-
self from this dilemma. In one dream he
was a "monk on a secret mission.'’ In another,
his instincts tempted him into a brothel:

Together with a military comrade who has had
many erotic adventures I find myself waiting in
front of a house on a dark street in an unknown
city. Entrance is permitted only to women. There-
fore, in the hall, my friend puts on a little carni-
val mask of a woman’s face and goes up the stairs.
Possibly 1 did the same as he, but I do not remember
clearly.

What this dream proposes would satisfy
Henry’s curiosity — but only at the price of a
fraud. As a man he lacks the courage to enter
the house, which is obviously a brothel. But if
he divests himself of his masculinity, he might
gain an insight into this forbidden world — for-
bidden by his conscious mind. The dream,
however, does not tell us whether he decides
to enter. Henry had not yet overcome his inhi-
bitions- an understandable failure if we con-
sider the implications of going into the brothel.

The above dream seemed to me to reveal a
homoerotic strain in Henry: He appeared to
feel that a feminine "mask” would make him

The pig like animal of the dream
connotes bestiality and lustfulness -
as in the myth of Circe, who turned
men into swine Above left, from
a Greek vase, a pig -man, Odysseus,
and Circe. Right, in one of the
cartoons by George Grosz attacking
pre-war German society, a man (with
a prostitute) is given a pig s head
to show his vulgarity

attractive to men. This hypothesis was sup-
ported by the following dream:

1 find myself back in my fifth or sixth year. My
playmate of those days tells me how he partici-
pated in an obscene act with the director of a
factory. My friend laid his right hand on the
man's penis to keep it warm and at the same
time to warm his own hand. The director was an
intimate friend of my father's whom I venerated
for his broad and varied interests. But he was
laughed at by us as an “eternal youth.”

For children of that age homoerotic play is
not unusual. That Henry still came to it in his
dream suggests that it was loaded with guilt
feelings, and therefore strongly repressed. Such
feelings were linked to his deep fear about form-
ing a lasting tie with a woman. Another dream
and its associations illustrated this conflict:

I take part in the wedding of an unknown couple.
At one in the morning the little wedding party
returns from the festivities— the bridal couple, the
best man, and the maid of honor. They enter a
large courtyard where I await them. It seems
that the newlyweds have already had a quarrel, as
well as the other couple. They finally find the
solution by having the two men and the two women
retire separately.

Henry explained: “You see here the war of
the sexes as Giraudoux describes it. 55 And then
he added : “The palace in Bavaria, where I
remember seeing this dream-courtyard, has
until lately been disfigured by emergency
housing for poor people. When I visited there,
I asked myself if it would not be preferable to
eke out a poor existence in the ruins of classic
beauty than to lead an active life surrounded
by the ugliness of a great city. I also asked
myself when I was a witness at the wedding
of a comrade whether his marriage would last,
for his bride made an unfavorable impression
on me.”

The longing to withdraw into passivity and
introversion, the fear of an unsuccessful mar-
riage, the dream’s separation of the sexes — all
these are unmistakable symptoms of the secret
doubts hidden beneath Henry’s consciousness.

The saint and the prostitute

Henry's psychic condition was most impres-
sively depicted in the following dream, which
exposed his fear of primitive sensuality and
his desire to escape into a kind of asceticism.
In it one can see the direction his development
was taking. For this reason the dream will be
interpreted at greater length.

I find myself on a narrow mountain road. On
the left (going down) there is a deep abyss, on
the right a wall of rock. Along the road there are
several caves, shelters, cut out of the rock, as
protection from the weather for lonely wan-
derers. In one of these caves, half hidden, a
prostitute has taken refuge. Strangely, I see her
from behind, from the rock side. She has a form-
less, spongy body. I look at her with curiosity
and touch her buttocks. Perhaps, it suddenly
seems to me, she is not a woman but a kind of
male prostitute.

This same creature comes then to the fore as a
saint with a short crimson coat thrown around
his shoulders. He strides down the road and goes
into another, much larger cave fitted with rough-
hewn chairs and benches. With a haughty look
he drives out all those already present, also me.
Then he and his followers move in and establish
themselves.

The personal association that Henry contri-
buted to the prostitute was the “Venus of Wil-
lendorf,” a little carved figure (from the paleo-

284

lithic age) of a fleshy woman, probably a
nature or fertility goddess. Then he added :

“I first heard that touching the buttocks is a
fertility rite when I was on a tour through the
Wallis [a canton in French Switzerland ], where
I visited ancient Celtic graves and excavations.
There I was told that there was once a smooth
sloping surface of tiles smeared with all kinds
of substances. Infertile women had to slide
down on their bare buttocks in order to cure
their sterility.”

To the coat of the “saint,” Henry associated
this: “My fiancee owns a jacket of similar
shape, but it's white. On the evening before
the dream we were out dancing, and she was
wearing this white jacket. Another girl, who
is her friend, was with us. She had a crimson
jacket that 1 liked better.”

If dreams are not wish-fulfillments fas Freud
taught) but rather, as Jung assumed, "self-re-
presentations of the unconscious,” then we must
admit that Henry's psychic condition could
hardly be better represented than in the de-
scription given in the "saint” dream.

Henry is a “lonely wanderer" on the narrow
path. But (perhaps thanks to analysis)' he is
already on his way down from inhospitable
heights. To the left, on the side of the uncon-
scious, his road is bordered by the terrifying

depths of an abyss. On the right side, the side
of consciousness, the way is blocked by the
rigid rock wall of his conscious views. How-
ever, in the caves (which might represent, so
to speak, unconscious areas in Henry’s field of
consciousness) there are places where refuge can
be found when bad weather comes — in other
words, when outside tensions become too
threatening.

The caves are the result of purposeful human
work: cut into the rock. In a way they re-
semble the gaps that occur in our conscious-
ness when our power of concentration has
reached its limits and is broken, so that the
stuff of fantasy can penetrate without restraint.
At such times something unexpected can reveal
itself and allow' a deep insight into the back-
ground of the psyche — a glimpse into the un-
conscious regions where our imagination has
free play. Moreover, rock caves may be symbols
of the womb of Mother Earth, appearing as
mysterious caverns in which transformation
and rebirth can come about.

Thus the dream seems to represent Henry's
introverted withdrawal- when the world be-
comes too difficult for him— into a “cave” with-
in his consciousness where he can succumb to
subjective fantasies. This interpretation would
also explain why he seeks the female figure —

Left, Henry's drawing of the boat
of his dream, with a stone wall for
a railing — another image of his
introversion and fear of life.

Right, the prehistoric sculpture
known asthe "Venus of Willendorf"
— one of Henry's associations to
the image of the prostitute in his
dream In the same dream, the saint
is seen in a sacred cave. Many
actual caves are holy places like
the Cave of Bernadette (far right)
at Lourdes, where a vision of the
Virgin Mary appeared to a girl.

285

a replica of some of the inner feminine traits of
his psyche. She is a formless, spongy, half-
hidden prostitute representing the repressed
image in his unconscious of a woman whom
Henry would never have approached in con-
scious life. She would always have been strictly
taboo to him in spite of the fact that fas the
opposite of a too-much-venerated mother) the
prostitute would have a secret fascination for
him— as for every son with a mother-complex.

The idea of restricting a relationship with a
woman to a purely animal-like sensuality, ex-
cluding all feelings, is often enticing to such a
young man. In such a union he can keep his
feelings split off, and thus can remain “true”
to his mother in an ultimate sense. Thus, in
spite of everything, the taboo set by the mother
against every other woman remains inflexibly
effective in the psyche of the son.

Henry, who seems to have withdrawn totally
to the background of his fantasy-cave, sees the
prostitute only “from behind.” He dares not
look her in the face. But “from the back” also
means from her least human side -her buttocks

(i.e. the part of her body that will stimulate
the sensual activity of the male).

By touching the buttocks of the prostitute,
Henry unconsciously carries out a kind of fer-
tility rite, similar to the rites that are practiced
in many primitive tribes. The laying on of
hands and healing often go together; in the
same way, touching with the hand can be
either a defense or a curse.

Immediately the idea arises that the figure is
not a woman after all but a male prostitute.
The figure thus becomes hermaphroditic, like
many mythological figures (and like the “priest”
figure of the first dream). Insecurity concerning
his own sex can often be observed in a pubes-
cent individual ; and for this reason homosexu-
ality in adolescence is not considered unusual.
Nor is such uncertainty exceptional for a young
man with Henry's psychological structure; he
had already implied this in some of his earlier
dreams.

But repression (as well as sexual uncertainty)
may have caused the confusion about the sex
of the prostitute. The female figure that has

A coat can often symbolize the outer
mask or persona that one presents to
the world The mantle of the prophet
Elijah bore a similar meaning: When
he ascended to heaven (left, in a
Swedish peasant painting), he left
the mantle behind for his successor
Elisha Thus the mantle represented
the prophet's power and role, to be
assumed by his successor ( In the
painting the mantle is red, like the
saint's coat in Henry's dream.)

both attracted and repelled the dreamer is
transformed —first of all into a man and then
into a saint. T he second transformation elimi-
nates everything sexual from the image, and
implies that the only means of escape from the
reality of sex lies in the adoption of an ascetic
and holy life, denying the flesh. Such dramatic
reversals are common in dreams: Something
turns into its opposite (as the prostitute becomes
a saint) as if to demonstrate that by transmuta-
tion even extreme opposites can change into
each other.

Henry also saw something significant in the
saint’s coat. A coat is often a symbol of the
protective cov er or mask (which Jung called the
persona) that an individual presents to the
world. It has two purposes: first, to make a
specific impression on other people: second, to
conceal the individual’s inner self from their
prying eyes. The persona that Henry’s dream
gives the saint tells us something about his atti-
tude to his fiancee and her friend. The saint’s
coat has the color of the friend’s jacket, which
Henry had admired, but it also had the shape
of his fiancee’s coat. This may imply that
Henry’s unconscious wanted to confer the
quality of saintliness on both women, in order
to protect himself against their womanly attrac-
tiveness. Also, the coat is red, which (as has
been noted before) is traditionally the symbolic
color of feeling and passion. It thus gives the
saint figure a kind of eroticized spirituality — a

quality that is frequently found in men who
repress their own sexuality and try to rely solely
on their “spirit” or reason.

Such an escape from the world of' the flesh,
however, is unnatural in a young person. In
the first half of life, we should learn to accept
our sexuality : It is essential to the preservation
and continuation of our species. The dream
seems to be reminding Henry ofjust this point.

When the saint leaves the cave and walks
down the road (descending from the heights
toward the valley), he enters a second cave
with rough-hewn benches and chairs, which
reminds one of the early Christians’ places of
worship and refuge from persecution. This cave
seems to be a healing, holy place — a place of
meditation and of the mystery of transforma-
tion from the earthly to the heavenly, from the
carnal to the spiritual.

Henry is not permitted to follow the saint,
but is turned out of the cave with all those
present (that is, with his unconscious entities).
Seemingly, Henry and all the others who are
not followers of the saint are being told that
they must live in the outside world. The dream
seems to say that Henry must first succeed in
outer life before he will be able to immerse him-
self in a religious or spiritual sphere. The figure
of the saint also seems to symbolize (in a rela-
tively undifferentiated, anticipatory fashion)
the Self; but Henry is not yet mature enough to
stay in the immediate vicinity of this figure.

Henry's touching the prostitute can
be related to the belief in the
magical effect of a touch: Left,
the 1 7th century Irishman Valentine
Greatrakes, famous for healing by
laying on of hands.

Right, another example of the
persona : The clothing worn by
rebellious British "beatnik " youths
in the 1 960s indicated the values
and way of life that they wanted to
display to the outer world

How the analysis developed

In spite of an initial skepticism and resistance,
Henry began to take a lively interest in the
inner happenings of his psyche. He was obvi-
ously impressed by his dreams. They seemed to
compensate for his unconscious life in a mean-
ingful way and to give him valuable insights
into his ambivalence, his vacillation, and his
preference for passivity.

After a time more positive dreams appeared
that showed that Henry was already “well on
his way.” Two months after his analysis had
begun he reported this dream:

In the harbor of a little place not far from my
home, on the shore of a lake in the neighborhood,
locomotives and freight cars are being raised
from the bottom of the lake where they had been
sunk in the last war. First a large cylinder like
a locomotive boiler is brought up. Then an enor-
mous, rusty freight car. The whole picture pre-

sents a horrible yet romantic sight. The recovered
pieces have to be transported away under the
rails and cables of the nearby railway station.
Then the bottom of the lake changes into a green
meadow.

Here we see what a remarkable inner ad-
vance Henry has made. Locomotives (probably
symbols of energy and dynamism) have been
“sunk” i.c. repressed into tin* unconscious
but are now being brought into the light of
day. With them are freight cars, in which all
kinds of valuable cargo (psychic qualities) can
be transported. Now that these “objects” have
again become available for Henry's conscious
life, he can begin to realize how much active
power could be at his disposal. The transforma-
tion of the dark lake bottom into a meadow
underlines his potential for positive action.

Sometimes, on Henry's “lonely journey” to-
ward maturity, he also received help from his

feminine side. In his 24th dream he meets a
“humpbacked girl":

I am on the way to a school together with an
unknown young lady of small and dainty appear-
ance but disfigured by a hump. Many other
people also go into the schoolhouse. While the
others disperse to different rooms for singing
lessons, the girl and I sit at a little square table.
She gives me a private singing lesson. I feel an
impulse of pity for her and therefore kiss her on
the mouth. I am conscious, however, that by this
act I am unfaithful to my fiancee -even though it
may be excusable.

Singing is one of the immediate expressions
of feelings. But (as we have seen) Henry is afraid
of his feelings; he knows them only in an
idealized adolescent form. Nevertheless, in this
dream he is taught singing (the expression of
feelings) at a square table. The table, with its
lour equal sides, is a representation of the
“fourfoldness" motif, usually a symbol of com-
pleteness. Thus the relation between singing

As in the painting, left (by the
1 9th-century British artist William
Turner), entitled Rain, Steam . and
Speed, the locomotive is clearly an
image of driving, dynamic energy.

In Henry's dream (which he drew,
below), locomotives are raised out
of a lake — an expression of the
release of a potential for valuable
action that had previously been
repressed into his unconscious.

and the square table seems to indicate that
Henry must integrate his “feeling" side before
he can achieve psychic wholeness. In fact, the
singing lesson does move his feelings, and he
kisses the girl on her mouth. Thereby he has, in
a sense, “espoused" her (otherwise he would
not feel “unfaithful" ) ; he has learned to relate
to “the woman within."

Another dream demonstrates the part that
this little humpbacked girl had to play in
Henry's inner development :

I am in an unknown boys' school. During the
instruction period I secretly force my way into
the house, I don't know for what purpose. I hide in
the room behind a little square closet. The door to
the corridor is half open. I fear being detected. An
adult goes by without seeing me. But a little hump-
backed girl comes in and sees me at once. She pulls
me out of my hiding place.

Not only does the same girl appear in both
dreams, but both appearances take place in a
schoolhouse. In each instance Henry must learn
something to assist his development. Seemingly,
he would like to satisfy his desire for know-
ledge while remaining unnoticed and passive.

The figure of a deformed little girl appears
in numerous fairy tales. In such tales the ugli-
ness of the hump usually conceals great beauty,
which is revealed when the “right man" comes
to free the girl from a magic spell— often by a
kiss. The girl in Henry's dream may be a
symbol of Henry's soul, which also has to be
released from the “spell" that has made it ugly.

When the humpbacked girl tries to awaken
Henry's feelings by song, or pulls him out of
his dark hiding place (forcing him to confront
the light of day), she shows herself as a helpful
guide. Henry can and must in a sense belong
simultaneously to both his fiancee and the little'
humpbacked girl ( to the first as a representative
of the real, outer woman, and to the second
as the embodiment of the inner psychic anima).

289

The oracle dream

People who rely totally on their rational think-
ing and dismiss or repress every manifestation
of their psychic life often have an almost inex-
plicable inclination to superstition. They listen
to oracles and prophecies and can be easily
hoodwinked or influenced by magicians and
conjurers. And because dreams compensate
one’s outer life, the emphasis such people put
on their intellect is offset by dreams in which
they meet the irrational and cannot escape it.

Henry experienced this phenomenon in the
course of his analysis, in an impressive way.
Four extraordinary dreams, based on such irra-
tional themes, represented decisive milestones
in his spiritual development. The first of these
came about 10 weeks after the analysis began.
As Henry reported the dream :

Alone on an adventurous journey through South
America, I feel, at last, the desire to return home. In
a foreign city situated on a mountain I try to reach
the railway station, which I instinctively suspect
to be in the center of the town at its highest level. I
fear I may be too late.

Fortunately, however, a vaulted passage breaks
through the row of houses on my right, built
closely together as in the architecture of the
Middle Ages, forming an impenetrable wall be-
hind which the station is probably to be found.
The whole scene offers a very picturesque aspect.
I see the sunny, painted facades of the houses, the
dark archway in whose shadowy obscurity four
ragged figures have settled down on the pave-
ment. With a sigh of relief, I hurry toward the
passage — when suddenly a stranger, a trapper-
type, appears ahead of me evidently filled with
the same desire to catch the train.

At our approach the four gatekeepers, who
turn out to be Chinese, jump up to prevent our
passage. In the ensuing fight my left leg is injured
by the long nails on the left foot of one of the
Chinese. An oracle has to decide now whether the
way could be opened to us or whether our lives
must be forfeited.

I am the first to be dealt with. While my com-
panion is bound and led inside, the Chinese con-

sult the oracle by using little ivory sticks. The
judgment goes against me, but I am given an-
other chance. I am fettered and led aside, just
as my companion was, and he now takes my
place. In his presence, the oracle has to decide
my fate for the second time. On this occasion it is
in my favor. I am saved.

One immediately notices the singularity and
the exceptional meaning of the dream, its
wealth of symbols, and its compactness. How-
ever, it seemed as if Henry’s conscious mind
wanted to ignore the dream . Because of his skep-
ticism toward the products of his unconscious
it was important not to expose the dream to
the danger of rationalization, but rather to let
it act on him without interference. So I re-
frained at first from my interpretation. Instead
I offered only one suggestion: I advised him
to read and then to consult (as did .the Chinese
figures in his dream) the famous Chinese oracle
book, the I Ching.

The I Ching , the so-called “Book of
Changes,” is a very ancient book of wisdom;
its roots go back to mythical times, and it comes
to us in its present form from 3000 b.c. Accord-
ing to Richard Wilhelm (who translated it into
German and provided an admirable commen-
tary), both of the main branches of Chinese
philosophy— Taoism and Confucianism — have
their common origin in the I Ching . The book
is based on the hypothesis of the oneness of
man and the surrounding cosmos, and of the
complementary pairs of opposites Yang and
Yin (i.e. the male and female principles). It
consists of 64 “signs” each represented by a
drawing made up of six lines. In these signs are
contained all the possible combinations of Y ang
and Yin. The straight lines are looked upon as
male, the broken lines as female.

Each sign describes changes in the human
or cosmic situation, and each prescribes, in a

290

pictorial language, the course of action to be
followed at such times. The Chinese consulted
this oracle by means that indicated which of
the signs was relevant at a given moment. They
did so by using 50 small sticks in a rather com-
plicated way that yielded a given number.
(Incidentally, Henry said that he had once read
— probably in Jung's commentary on ‘'The
Secret of the Golden Flower” — of a strange
game sometimes used by the Chinese to find
out about the future.)

Today the more usual method of consulting
the I Ching is to use three coins. Each throw
of the three coins yields one line. “Heads,"
which stands for a male line, count as three;
“tails,” a broken female line, count as two.
The coins are thrown six times, and the num-
bers that are produced indicate the sign or
hexagram (i.e. the set of six lines] to be
consulted.

But what significance has such “fortune tell-
ing” for our own time? Even those who accept
the idea that the I Chmg is a storehouse of
wisdom will find it hard to believe that con-
sultation of the oracle is anything more than
an experiment in the occult. It is indeed diffi-

cult to grasp that more is involved, for the
ordinary person today consciously dismisses all
divining techniques as archaic nonsense. Yet
they are not nonsense. As Dr. Jung has shown,
they are based on what he calls the “principle
ofsynchronicity” (or, more simply, meaningful
coincidence). He has described this difficult new
idea in his essay “Synchronicity : An Acausal
Connecting Principle.” It is based on the
assumption of an inner unconscious knowledge
that links a physical event with a psychic con-
dition, so that a certain event that appears
“accidental” or “coincidental” can in fact be
psychically meaningful; and its meaning is
often symbolically indicated through dreams
that coincide with the event.

Several weeks after having studied the /
Ching , Henry followed my suggestion (with
considerable skepticism) and threw the coins.
What he found in the book had a tremendous
impact on him. Briefly, the oracle to which he
referred bore several startling references to his
dream, and to his psychological condition gen-
erally. By a remarkable “synchronistic” coinci-
dence, the sign that was indicated by the coin-
pattern was called Meng — or “Youthful Folly.”

Left, two pages of the / Ching
showing the hexagram Meng (which
stands for "youthful folly"). The
top three lines of the hexagram
symbolize a mountain, and can also
represent a gate; the bottom three
lines symbolize water and the abyss.

Right, Henry'sdrawing ofthe sword
and helmet that appeared to him in
a fantasy, and that also related to
a section of the / Ching — Li, "the
clinging, fire."

In this chapter there are several parallels to the
dream motifs in question. According to the text
of the I Ching , the three upper lines of this
hexagram symbolize a mountain, and have the
meaning of ‘'keeping still”; they can also be
interpreted as a gate. The three lower lines sym-
bolize water, the abyss, and the moon. All these
symbols have occurred in Henry’s previous
dreams. Among many other statements that
seemed to apply to Henry was the following
warning: “For youthful folly, it is the most
hopeless thing to entangle itself in empty imag-
inings. The more obstinately it clings to such
unreal fantasies the more certainly will humilia-
tion overtake it.”

In this and other complex ways, the oracle
seemed to be directly relevant to Henry’s pro-
blem. This shook him. At first he tried to sup-
press its effect by willpower, but he could not
escape it or his dreams. The message of the
/ Ching seemed to touch him deeply in spite of
the puzzling language in which it was expressed.
He became overpowered by the very irration-
ality whose existence he had so long denied.
Sometimes silent, sometimes irritated, reading
the words that seemed to coincide so strongly
with the symbols in his dreams, he said, “I must
think all this over thoroughly,” and he left
before our session was up. He canceled his next
session by telephone, because of influenza, and
did not reappear. I waited ("keeping still”)
because I supposed that he might not yet have
digested the oracle.

A month went by. Finally Henry reappeared,
excited and disconcerted, and told me what had
happened in the meantime. Initially his intel-
lect (which he had until then relied upon so
much) had suffered a great shock — and one
that he had at first tried to suppress. However,
he soon had to admit that the communications
of the oracle were pursuing him. He had in-
tended to consult the book again, because in
his dream the oracle had been consulted twice.
But the text of the chapter ‘'Youthful Folly”
expressly forbids the putting of a second ques-
tion. For two nights Henry had tossed sleep-
lessly in bed; but on the third a luminous
dream image of great power had suddenly

appeared before his eyes: a helmet with a
sword floating in empty space.

Henry immediately took up the I Ching
again and opened it at random to a commen-
tary on Chapter 30, where (to his great sur-
prise) he read the following passage: “The
clinging is fire, it means coats of mail, helmets,
it means lances and weapons.” Now he felt
that he understood why a second intentional
consulting of the oracle was forbidden. For in
his dream the ego was excluded from the
second question; it was the trapper who had
to consult the oracle the second time. In the
same way, it was Henry’s semi-unconscious
action that had unintentionally asked the
second question of the I Ching by opening the
book at random and coming upon a symbol
that coincided with his nocturnal vision.

Henry was clearly so deeply stirred that it
seemed time to try to interpret the dream that
had sparked the transformation. In view of the
events of the dream, it was obvious that the
dream-elements should be interpreted as con-
tents of Henry’s inner personality and the six
dream-figures as personification of his psychic
qualities. Such dreams are relatively rare, but
when they do occur their after-effects are all
the more powerful. That is why they could
be called “dreams of transformation.”

With dreams of such pictorial power, the
dreamer seldom has more than a few personal
associations. All Henry could offer was that he
had recently tried for a job in Chile, and had
been refused because they would not employ
unmarried men. He also knew that some
Chinese let the nails of their left hand grow
as a sign that instead of working they have
given themselves over to meditation.

Henry's failure (to get a job in South
America) was presented to him in the dream.
In it he is transported into a hot southern

Right, a parallel to the gatekeepers
of Henry's "oracle dream": one of
a pair of sculptures (1 Oth -1 3th
century) that guard the entrance
to China's Mai-chi-san caves.

292

world —a world that, in contrast to Europe, he
would call primitive, uninhibited, and sensual.
It represents an excellent symbolic picture of
the realm of the unconscious.

This realm was the opposite of the cultivated
intellect and Swiss puritanism that ruled Hen-
ry's conscious mind. It was, in fact, his natural
‘‘shadow land," for which he had longed; but
after a while he did not seem to feel too com-
fortable there. From the chthonic, dark,
maternal powers (symbolized by South Ameri-
ca) he is drawn back in the dream to the light,
personal mother and to his fiancee. He sud-
denly realizes how far he has gone away from
them ; he finds himself alone in a “foreign city."

This increase in consciousness is symbolized
in the dream as a “higher level"; the city was
built on a mountain. So Henry “climbed up"
to a greater consciousness in the “shadow
land"; from there he hoped “to find his way
home." This problem of ascending a mountain
had already been put to him in his initial

dream. And, as in the dream of the saint and
the prostitute, or in many mythological tales, a
mountain often symbolizes a place of revela-
tion, where transformation and change may
take place.

The “city on the mountain" is also a well-
known archetypal symbol that appears in the
history of our culture in many variations. The
city, corresponding in its ground plan to a man-
dala, represents that “region of the soul" in the
middle of which the Self (the psyche's inner-
most center and totality) has its abode.

Surprisingly, the seat of the Self is repre-
sented in Henry's dream as a traffic center of
the human collective— a railway station. This
may be because the Self (if the dreamer is
young and has a relatively low level of spiritual
development) is usually symbolized by an object
from the realm of his personal experience —
often a banal object, which compensates the
dreamer's high aspirations. Only in the mature
person acquainted with the images of his soul
is the Self realized in a symbol that corresponds
to its unique v alue.

Even though Henry does not actually know
where the station is, he nevertheless supposes it
to be in the center of the city, on its highest
point. Here, as in earlier dreams, he receives
help from his unconscious. Henry's conscious
mind was identified with his profession as an
engineer, so he would also like his inner world
to relate to rational products of civilization, like
a railway station. The dream, however, rejects
this attitude and indicates a completely dif-
ferent way.

The way leads “under" and through a dark
arch. An arched gateway is also a symbol for a
threshold, a place where dangers lurk, a place
that at the same time separates and unites.
Instead of the railway station that Henry was
looking for, which was to connect uncivilized
South America with Europe, Henry finds him-
self before a dark arched gateway where four
ragged Chinese, stretched on the ground, block
the passage. The dream makes no distinction
between them, so they may be seen as lour still
undifferentiated aspects of a male totality. (The
number four, a symbol of wholeness and corn-

293

pleteness, represents an archetype that Dr. Jung
has discussed at length in his writings.)

The Chinese thus represent unconscious male
psychic parts of Henry that he cannot pass, be-
cause the “way to the Self” (i.e. to the psychic
center) is barred by them and must still be
opened to him. Until this issue has been settled
he cannot continue his journey.

Still unaware of the impending danger,
Henry hurries to the gateway, expecting at last
to reach the station. But on his way he meets
his “shadow” — his unlived, primitive side,
which appears in the guise of an earthy, rough
trapper. The appearance of this figure probably
means that Henry’s introverted ego has been
joined by his extra verted (compensatory) side,
which represents his repressed emotional and
irrational traits. This shadow figure pushes itself'
past the conscious ego into the foreground, and,
because it personifies the activity and autonomy
of unconscious qualities, it becomes the proper
carrier of fate, through whom everything
happens.

The dream moves toward its climax. During
the fight between Henry, the trapper, and the
four ragged Chinese, Henry’s left leg is
scratched by the long nails on the left foot of
one of the four. (Here, it seems, the European
character of Henry’s conscious ego has collided
with a personification of the ancient wisdom of
the East, with the extreme opposite of his ego.
The Chinese come from an entirely different
psychic continent, from an “other side” that is

still quite unknown to Henry and that seems
dangerous to him.)

The Chinese can also be said to stand for the
“yellow earth”; for the Chinese people are
related to the earth as few people are. And it
is just this earthy, chthonic quality that Henry
had to accept. The unconscious male totality
of his psyche, which he met in his dream, had
a chthonic material aspect that his intellectual
conscious side lacked. Thus the fact -that he
recognized the four ragged figures as Chinese
shows that Henry had gained an increase of
inner awareness concerning the nature of his
adversaries.

Henry had heard that the Chinese sometimes
let the nails of their left hand grow long. But
in the dream the long nails are on the left foot;
they are, so to speak, claws. This may indicate
that the Chinese have a point of view so dif-
ferent from Henry’s that it injures him. As we

Below, a drawing by a patient under
analysis depicts a black monster
(on the red or "feeling" side) and a
Madonna-like woman (on the blue
or spiritual side). This was Henry's
position: over-emphasis on purity,
chastity, etc. and fear of the
irrational unconscious. (But note
that the green, mandala-like flower
acts as a link between the opposing
sides.) Below left, another patient's
painting depicting his insomnia —
caused by his repressing too
strongly his passionate, red,
instinctual drives (which may
overwhelm his consciousness)
by a black wall" of anxiety
and depression.

know, Henry’s conscious attitude toward the
chthonic and feminine, toward the material
depths of his nature, was most uncertain and
ambivalent. This attitude, symbolized by his
“left leg” (the point of view or “standpoint” of
his feminine, unconscious side of which he is
still afraid), was harmed by the Chinese,

This “injury,” however, did not itself bring
about a change in Henry, Every transforma-
tion demands as its precondition “the ending of
a world” — the collapse of an old philosophy of
life. As Dr. Henderson has pointed out earlier
in this book, at ceremonies of initiation a youth
must suffer a symbolic death before he can be
reborn as a man and be taken into the tribe
as a full member. Thus the scientific, logical
attitude of the engineer must collapse to make
room for a new attitude.

In the psyche of an engineer, everything
“irrational” may be repressed, and therefore
often reveals itself in the dramatic paradoxes of
the dream-world. Thus the irrational appeared
in Henry’s dream as an “oracle game” of for-
eign origin, with a fearful and inexplicable
power to decide human destinies. Henry’s
ratirnal ego had no alternative but to surrender
unconditionally in a real sacrificium intellectus.

Yet the conscious mind of such an inexperi-
enced, immature person as Henry is not suffi-
ciently prepared for such an act. He loses the
turn of fortune, and his life is forfeit. He is
caught, unable to go on in his accustomed way
or to return home — to escape his adult respon-
sibilities. (It was this insight for which Henry
had to be prepared by this “great dream.”)

Next, Henry’s conscious, civilized ego is
bound and put aside while the primitive trap-
per is allowed to take his place and to consult
the oracle. Henry’s life depends on the result.
But when the ego is imprisoned in isolation,
those contents of the unconscious that are per-
sonified in the shadow-figure may bring help
and solution. This becomes possible when one
recognizes the existence of such contents and
has experienced their power. They can then
become our consciously accepted constant com-
panions. Because the trapper (his shadow) wins
the game in his place, Henry is saved.

Facing the irrational

Henry’s subsequent behavior clearly showed
that the dream (and the fact that his dreams
and the oracle book of the I Ching had brought
him to face deep and irrational powers within
himself) had a very deep effect on him. From
then on he listened eagerly to the communica-
tions of his unconscious, and the analysis took
on a more and more agitated character. The
tension that until then had threatened the
depths of his psyche with disruption came to
the surface. Nevertheless, he courageously held
to the growing hope that a satisfactory conclu-
sion would be reached.

Barely two weeks after the oracle dream (but
before it was discussed and interpreted), Henry
had another dream in which he was once again
confronted with the disturbing problem of the
irrational :

Alone in my room. A lot of disgusting black
beetles crawl out of a hole and spread out over my
drawing table. I try to drive them back into their
hole by means of some sort of magic. I am success-
ful in this except for four or five beetles, which
leave my table again and spread out into the
whole room. I give up the idea of following them
further; they are no longer so disgusting to me. I
set fire to the hiding place. A tall column of flame
rises up. I fear my room might catch fire, but this
fear is unfounded.

By this time, Henry had become relatively
skilful in the interpretation of his dreams, so he
tried to give this dream an explanation of his
own. He said : “The beetles are my dark quali-
ties. They were awakened by the analysis and
come up now to the surface. There is a danger
that they may overflow my professional work
(symbolized by the drawing table). Yet I did
not dare to crush the beetles, which reminded
me of a kind of black scarab, with my hand as
I first intended, and therefore had to use
'magic.’ In setting fire to their hiding place I,

295

so to speak, call for the collaboration of some-
thing divine, as the upshooting column of flame
makes me think of the fire that I associate with
the Ark of the Covenant. ”

To go deeper into the symbolism of' the
dream, we must first of' all note that these
beetles are black, which is the color of darkness,
depression, and death. In the dream, Henry is
“alone" in his room a situation that can lead
to introversion and corresponding states of
gloom. In mythology, scarab beetles often
appear golden; in Egypt they were sacred
animals symbolizing the sun. But if they are
black, they symbolize the opposite side of the
sun - something devilish. Therefore, Henry's
instinct is quite correct in wanting to fight the
beetles with magic.

Though four or five of the beetles remain
alive, the decrease in the number of beetles is
enough to free Henry from his fear and disgust.
He then tries to destroy their breeding ground
by fire. This is a positive action, because fire
can symbolically lead to transformation and re-
birth fas, for instance, it does in the ancient
myth of the phoenix ).

In his waking life, Henry now seemed full of
enterprising spirit, but apparently he had not
yet learned to use it to the right effect. There-
fore, I want to consider another, later dream
that throws an even clearer light on his pro-
blem. This dream presents in symbolic language
Henry's fear of a responsible relationship with
a woman and his tendency to withdraw from
the feeling side of life:

An old man is breathing his last. He is sur-
rounded by his relatives, and I am among them.
More and more people gather in the large room,
each one characterizing himself' through precise
statements. There are a good 40 persons present.
The old man groans and mutters about “unlived
life." His daughter, who wants to make his con-
fession easier, asks him in what sense “unlived"
is to be understood; whether cultural or moral.
The old man will not answer. His daughter sends
me to a small adjoining room where I am to find
the answer by telling a fortune with cards. The
“nine" that I turn up will give the answer, accord-
ing to the color.

Above, an Egyptian relief (c 1 300
b c.) shows a scarab beetle and the
god Amon within the circle of the
sun. In Egypt the golden scarab was
itself a symbol of the sun Below,
a quite different kind of insect,
more like the "devilish'' beetles
of Henry's dream: an engraving by
the 1 9th-century artist James Ensor
of humans with dark, repulsive
insect bodies.

V

296

I expect to turn up a nine at the very begin-
ning, but at first I turn up various kings and
queens. I am disappointed. Now I turn up nothing
but scraps of paper that don’t belong to the game
at all. Finally, I discover that there are no more
cards in the deck but only envelopes and other
pieces of paper. Together with my sister, who is
also present, I look everywhere for the cards.
Finally I discover one under a textbook or a note-
book. It is nine, a nine of spades. It seems to me
that this can only mean one thing: that it was
moral chains that prevented the old man from
diving his life.”

The essential message of this strange dream
was to warn Henry what awaited him if he
failed to “five his life. ' ' The “old man" prob-
ably represents the dying “ruling principle” -
the principle that rules Henry's consciousness,
but whose nature is unknown to him. The 40
people present symbolize the totality of Henry's
psychic traits (40 is a number of totality, an
elevated form of the number four). That the
old man is dying could be a sign that part of
Henry’s male personality is on the verge of a
final transformation.

The daughter’s query about the possible
cause of death is the unavoidable and decisive
question. There seems to be an implication that
the old man’s “morality” has prevented him
from living out his natural feelings and drives.
Yet the dying man himself is silent. Therefore
his daughter (the personification of the mediat-
ing feminine principle, the anima) has to be-
come active.

She sends Henry to discover the answer from
the fortune-telling cards— the answer that will
be given by the color of the first nine turned up.
The fortune telling has to take place in an un-
used, remote room (revealing how far away
such a happening is from Henry’s conscious
attitude).

He is disappointed when at first he uncovers
only kings and queens (perhaps collective
images of his youthful veneration for power
and wealth). This disappointment becomes in-
tense when the picture-cards run out, for this
shows that the symbols of the inner world have
also been exhausted. Only “scraps of paper”

are left, without any images. Thus the source
of pictures dries up in the dream. Henry then
has to accept the help of his feminine side (this
time represented by his sister) to find the last
card. Together with her, he finally finds a card
— the nine of spades. It is this card that must
serve to indicate by its color what the phrase
“unlived life” meant in the dream. And it is
significant that the card is hidden under a text-
book or notebook - which probably represents
the arid intellectual formulas of Henry’s tech-
nical interests.

The nine has been a “magic number” for
centuries. According to the traditional symbol-
ism of numbers, it represents the perfect form
of the perfected Trinity in its threefold eleva-
tion. And there arc endless other meanings
associated with the number nine in various ages
and cultures. The color of the nine of spades is
the color of death and o( lifelessncss. Also, the
“spade” image strongly brings to mind the form
of a leaf, and therefore its blackness emphasizes
that instead of being green, vital, and natural
it is now dead. Furthermore, the word “spade”
derives from the Italian spada , which means
“sword” or “spear.” Such weapons often sym-
bolize the penetrating, “cutting” function of
the intellect.

Thus the dream makes it clear that it was
the “moral bonds” (rather than “cultural”) that
did not allow the old man to “live his life.” In
Henry’s case, these “bonds” probably were his
fear of surrendering fully to life, of accepting
responsibilities to a woman and thereby becom-
ing "unfaithful” to his mother. The dream has
declared that the “unlived life” is an illness of
which one can die.

Henry could no longer disregard the message
of this dream. He realized that one needs some-
thing more than reason as a helpful compass in
the entanglements of life; it is necessary to seek
the guidance of the unconscious powers that
emerge as symbols out of the depths of the
psyche. With this recognition, the goal of this
part of his analysis was reached. He now knew
that he was finally expelled from the paradise
of an uncommitted life and that he could never
return to it.

297

The final dream

A further dream came to confirm irrevocably
the insights Henry had gained. After some un-
important short dreams that concerned his
everyday life, the last dream (the 50th in the
series) appeared with all the wealth of symbols
that characterizes the so-called “great dreams.”

Above, a phoenix reborn in flames
(from a medieval Arabic manuscript)
—a well-known example of the
motif of death and rebirth by fire.
Below, a woodcut by the 1 9th-
century French artist Grandville
reflects some of the symbolic value
of playing cards. The Spades suit,
for instance, in French Piques, is
symbolically linked with the
"penetrating" intellect and, by its
black color, with death.

Four of us form a friendly group, and we have
the following experiences: Evening : We are sitting
at a long, raw-lumber table and drinking out of
each of three different vessels: from a liqueur
glass, a clear, yellow, sweet liqueur; from a wine
glass, dark red Campari; from a large, classically
shaped vessel, tea. In addition to us there is also
a girl of reserved, delicate nature. She pours her
liqueur into the tea.

Night: We have returned from a big drinking
bout. One of us is the President de la Republique
Franchise. We are in his palace. Walking out onto
the balcony we perceive him beneath us in the
snowy street as he, in his drunken condition,
urinates against a mound of snow. His bladder
content seems to be inexhaustible. Now he even
runs after an old spinster who carries in her arms
a child wrapped in a brown blanket. He sprays
the child with his urine. The spinster feels the
moisture but ascribes it to the child. She hurries
away with long steps.

Morning : Through the street, which glistens in
the winter sun, goes a Negro: a gorgeous figure,
completely naked. He walks toward the east,
toward Berne (that is, the Swiss capital). We are
in French Switzerland. We decide to go to pay
him a visit.

Noon: After a long automobile trip through a
lonely snowy region we come to a city, and into
a dark house where the Negro is said to have put up.
We are very much afraid that he might be frozen
to death. However, his servant, who is just as
dark, receives us. Negro and servant are mute.
We look into the rusksacks we have brought
with us, to see what each could give the Negro as a
gift. It must be some sort of object characteristic of
civilization. I am the first to make up my mind and
I take a package of matches from the floor and
offer it to the Negro with deference. After all have
presented their gifts, we join with the Negro in a
happy feast, a joyous revel.

Even at first glance the dream with its four
parts makes an unusual impression. It encom-
passes a whole day and moves toward the
“right,” in the direction of growing conscious-
ness. The movement starts with the evening,
goes over into the night, and ends at noon,
when the sun is at its zenith. Thus the cycle of
the “day” appears as a totality pattern.

In this dream the four friends seem to sym-
bolize the unfolding masculinity of Henry’s
psyche, and their progress through the four
“acts” of the dream has a geometric pattern
that reminds one of the essential construction
of the mandala. As they first came from the
east, then from the west, moving on toward
the “capital” of Switzerland (i.e. the center),
they seem to describe a pattern that tries to
unite the opposites in a center. And this point is
underlined by the movement in time — the de-
scent into the night of the unconsciousness, fol-
lowing the sun’s circuit, which is followed by
an ascent to the bright zenith of consciousness.

The dream begins in the evening, a time
when the threshold of consciousness is lowered
and the impulses and images of the unconscious
can pass across it. In such a condition (when
the feminine side of man is most easily evoked)
it is natural to find that a female figure joins
the four friends. She is the anima figure that
belongs to them all (“reserved and delicate,”
reminding Henry of his sister) and connects
them all to each other. On the table stand three
vessels of different character, which by their
concave form accentuate the receptiveness that
is symbolic of the feminine. The fact that these
vessels are used by all present indicates a
mutual and close relatedness among them. The
vessels differ in form (liqueur glass, wine glass,
and a classically formed container) and in the
color of their contents. The opposites into
which these fluids divide — sweet and bitter, red
and yellow, intoxicating and sobering— are all
intermingled, through being consumed by each

of the five persons present, who sink into an
unconscious communion.

The girl seems to be the secret agent, the
catalyst who precipitates events (for it is the
role of the anima to lead a man into his un
conscious, and thus to force him to deeper
recollection and increased consciousness). It is
almost as though with the mixing of liqueur
and tea the party would approach its climax.

The second part of the dream tells us more
of the happenings of this “night.” The four
friends suddenly find themselves in Paris
(which, for the Swiss, represents the town of
sensuality, of uninhibited joy and love). Here
a certain differentiation of the four takes place,
especially between the ego in the dream (which
is to a great extent identified with the leading
thinking function) and the “President de la Re-
publique,” who represents the undeveloped
and unconscious feeling function.

The ego (Henry and two friends, who may
be considered as representing his semi-conscious
functions) looks down from the height of a
balcony on the President, whose characteristics
are exactly what one would expect to find in
the undifferentiated side of the psyche. He is
unstable, and has abandoned himself to his
instincts. He urinates on the street in a drunken
state; he is unconscious of himself, like a person
outside civilization, following only his natural
animal urges. Thus the President symbolizes a
great contrast to the consciously accepted stan-
dards of a good middle-class Swiss scientist.
Only in the darkest night of the unconscious
could this side of Henry reveal itself.

However, the President-figure also has a very
positive aspect. His urine (which could be the
symbol of a stream of psychic libido) seems in-
exhaustible. It gives evidence of abundance, of
creative and vital strength, (Primitives, for in-
stance, regard everything coming from the body

hair, excrement, urine, or saliva — as creative,
as having magical powers.) This unpleasant

299

President-image, therefore, could also be a sign
of the power and plenty that often adheres to
the shadow side of the ego. Not only does he
urinate without embarrassment, but he runs
after an old woman who is holding a child.

This “old spinster'’ is in a way the opposite
or complement of the shy, fragile anima of the
first part of the dream. She is still a virgin, even
though old and seemingly a mother; in fact,
Henry associated her to the archetypal image
of Mary with the child Jesus. But the fact that
the baby is wrapped in a brown (earth-colored )
blanket makes it seem to be the chthonic, earth-
bound counter-image of the Savior rather than
a heavenly child. The President, who sprinkles
the child with his urine, seems to perform a
travesty of baptism. If we take the child as a
symbol of a potentiality within Henry that is
still infantile, then it could receive strength
through this ritual. But the dream says nothing
more; the woman hurries away with the child.

This scene marks the turning point of the
dream. It is morning again. Everything that
was dark, black, primitive, and powerful in the
last episode has been gathered together and
symbolized by a magnificent Negro, who
appears naked — i.e. real and true.

Just as darkness and bright morning — or hot
urine and cold snow— are opposites, so now the
black man and the white landscape form a
sharp antithesis. The four friends now must
orient themselves within these new dimensions.

A drinking vessel from ancient
Peru, in the shape of a woman,
reflects the feminine symbolism
of such containers, which occurs
in Henrysfinal dream

Their position has changed; the way that led
through Paris has brought them unexpectedly
into French Switzerland (where Henry's fian-
cee came from). A transformation has taken
place in Henry during the earlier phase, when
he was overpowered by unconscious contents of
his psyche. Now, for the last time, he can begin
to find his way forward from a place that w'as
his fiancee's home (showing that he accepts her
psychological background ).

At the beginning he went from eastern
Switzerland to Paris (from the east to the west,
where the way leads into darkness, the uncon-
sciousness ' . He has now T made a turn of 180 ,
toward the rising sun and the ever-increasing
clarity of consciousness. This way points to the
middle of Switzerland, to its capital, Berne, and
symbolizes Henry's striving toward a center
that would unite the opposites within him.

The Negro is for some people the archetypal
image of “the dark primal creature" and thus
a personification of certain contents of.the un-
conscious. Perhaps this is one reason why the
Negro is so often rejected and feared by people
of the white race. In him the white man sees
his living counterpart, his hidden, dark side
brought before his eyes. (This is just w hat most
people try to avoid; they want to cut it off and
repress it.) White men project onto the Negro
the primitive drives, the archaic powers, the
uncontrolled instincts that they do not want to
admit in themselves, of w hich they are uncon-
scious. and that they therefore designate as the
corresponding qualities of other people.

For a young man of Henry's age the Negro
may stand on the one hand for the sum of all
dark traits repressed into unconsciousness; on
the other hand, he may represent the sum of
his primitive, masculine strength and poten-
tialities, his emotional and physical power. That
Henry and his friends intend consciously to
confront the Negro signifies therefore a decisive
step forward on the way to manhood.

In the meantime it has become noon, when
the sun is at its highest, and consciousness has
reached its greatest clarity. We might say that
Henry’s ego has continued to become more and
more compact, that he has enhanced his ca pa-

300

city consciously to make decisions. It is still
winter, which may indicate a lack of feeling
and warmth in Henry; his psychic landscape is
still wintry and apparently intellectually very
cold. The four friends are afraid that the naked
Negro (being accustomed to a warm climate)
might be frozen. But their fear turns out to be
groundless, for after a long drive through de-
serted snow-covered country they stop in a
strange city and enter a dark house. This drive
and the desolate country is symbolic of the long
and wearisome search for self-development.

A further complication awaits the four
friends here. The Negro and his servant are
mute. Therefore it is not possible to make
verbal contact with them ; the four friends must
seek other means to get in touch with the
Negro. They cannot use intellectual means
(words) but rather a feeling gesture to approach
him. They offer him a present as one gives an
offering to the gods, to win their interest and
their affection. And it has to be an object of
our civilization, belonging to the values of the
intellectual white man. Again a sacrificium
intelleclus is demanded to win the favor of the
Negro, who represents nature and instinct.

Henry is the first to make up his mind what
to do. This is natural, since he is the bearer of
the ego, whose proud consciousness (or hybris)
has to be humbled. He picks up a box of
matches from the floor and presents it “with
deference” to the Negro. At first glance it may
seem absurd that a small object lying on the
floor and probably thrown away should be the
proper gift, but this was the right choice.
Matches are stored and controlled fire, a means
by which a flame can be lit and put out at any
time. Fire and flame symbolize warmth and
love, feeling and passion; they are qualities of
the heart, found wherever human beings exist.

In giving the Negro such a present, Henry
symbolically combines a highly developed civil-
ized product of his conscious ego with the
center of his own primitivity and male strength,
symbolized by the Negro. In this way, Henry
can come into the full possession of his male
sides, with which his ego must remain in con-
stant touch from now on.

This was the result. The six male persons—
the four friends, the Negro, and his servant
are now together in a gay spirit at a communal
meal. It is clear that here Henry’s masculine
totality has been rounded out. His ego seems
to have found the security it needs to enable
him consciously and freely to submit to the
greater archetypal personality within himself,
which foreshadows the emergence of the Self.

What happened in the dream had its parallel
also in Henry’s waking life. Now he was sure
of himself. Deciding quickly, he became serious
about his engagement. Exactly nine months
after his analysis had begun, he married in a
little church of western Switzerland; and he
left the following day with his young wife for
Canada to take up an appointment that he had
received during the decisive weeks of his last
dreams. Since then he has been living an active,
creative life as the head of a little family and
holds an executive position in a great industry.

Henry’s case reveals, so to speak, an acceler-
ated maturation to an independent and respon-
sible manliness. It represents an initiation into
the reality of outer life, a strengthening of the
ego and of his masculinity, and with this a com-
pletion of the first half of the individuation
process. The second half — which is the estab-
lishment of a right relationship between the ego
and the Self — still lies ahead of Henry, in the
second half of his life.

Not every case runs such a successful and
stirring course, and not every case can be
handled in a similar way. On the contrary,
every case is different. Not only do the young
and the old, or the man and the woman, call
for different treatment; so does every indi-
vidual in all these categories. Even the same
symbols require different interpretation in each
case. I have selected this one because it repre-
sents an especially impressive example of the
autonomy of the unconscious processes and
shows by its abundance of images the untiring
symbol-creating power of the psychic back-
ground. It proves that the self-regulating action
of the psyche (when not disturbed by too much
rational explanation or dissection) can support
the development process of the soul.

3 ° i

In Psychology and Alchemy Dr. Jung
discusses a sequence of over 1 000
dreams produced by one man. The
sequence revealed a striking number
and variety of representations of the
mandala motif —which is so often
linked with the realization of the
Self (see pp 21 3 ff). These pages
present a few examples of mandala
imagery from the dreams, to indicate
the vastly different forms in which
this archetype can manifest itseif,
even in one individual’s unconscious.
The interpretative meanings offered
here may, because of their brevity,
seem to be arbitrary assertions. In
practice no Jungian would produce
an interpretation of a dream without
knowledge of the dreamer and careful
study of his associations to the
dream. These interpretative statements
must be taken as hints toward
possible meanings — nothing more.

Left: In the dream the anima accuses
the man of being inattentive to her.

A clock says five minutes to the hour.
The man is being "pestered'' by his
unconscious; the tension thus
created is heightened by the clock,
by waiting for something to happen
in five minutes.

Below: A skull (which the man tries
in vain to kick away) becomes a
red ball, then a woman's head.

Here the man may try to reject the
unconscious (kicking the skull),
but it asserts itself by means of the
ball (perhaps alluding to the sun)
and the anima figure.

Left: In part of a dream, a prince
places a diamond ring on the fourth
finger of the dreamer's left hand.

The ring, worn like a wedding ring,
indicates that the dreamer has
taken a ''vow'' to the Self.

Below left: A veiled woman uncovers
her face, which shines like the sun.
The image implies an illumination
of the unconscious (involving the
anima) — quite different from
conscious elucidation.

Below: From a transparent sphere
containing small spheres, a green
plant grows. The sphere symbolizes
unity; the plant, life and growth.

Below: Troops, no longer preparing
for war, form an eight rayed star
and rotate to the left. This image
perhaps indicates that some inner
conflict has given way to harmony.

Conclusion: M.-L. von Franz
Science and the unconscious

In the preceding chapters C. G. Jung and some
of his associates have tried to make clear the
role played by the symbol-creating function in
man’s unconscious psyche and to point out some
fields of application in this newly discovered
area of life. We are still far from understanding
the unconscious or the archetypes — those dyna-
mic nuclei of the psyche — in all their implica-
tions. All we can see now is that the archetypes
have an enormous impact on the individual,
forming his emotions and his ethical and mental
outlook, influencing his relationships with
others, and thus affecting his whole destiny. We
can also see that the arrangement of archetypal
symbols follows a pattern of wholeness in the
individual, and that an appropriate understand-
ing of the symbols can have a healing effect.
And we can see that the archetypes can act as
creative or destructive forces in our mind:
creative when they inspire new ideas, destruc-
tive when these same ideas stiffen into con-
scious prej udices that inhibit further discoveries.

J ung has shown in his chapter how subtle and
differentiated all attempts at interpretation must
be, in order not to weaken the specific individual
and cultural values of archetypal ideas and sym-
bols by leveling them out- -i.c. by giving them
a stereotyped, intellectually formulated mean-
ing. J ung himsclfdedicated his entire life to such
investigations and interpretative work; natur-
ally this book sketches only an infinitesimal part
of his vast contribution to this new field of
psychological discovery. He was a pioneer and
remained fully aware that an enormous number
of further questions remained unanswered and
call for further investigation. This is why his
concepts and hypotheses are conceived on as
wide a basis as possible (without making them
too vague and all-embracing) and why his views
form a so-called “open system” that does not
close the door against possible new discoveries.

To j ung, his concepts were mere tools or
heuristic hypotheses that might help us to ex-

plore the vast new area of reality opened up by
the discovery of the unconscious- a discovery
that has not merely widened our whole view of
the world but has in fact doubled it. We must
always ask now whether a mental phenomenon
is conscious or unconscious and, also, whether a
“real” outer phenomenon is perceived by con-
scious or unconscious means.

The powerful forces of the unconscious most
certainly appear not only in clinical material
but also in the mythological, religious, artistic,
and all the other cultural activities by which
man expresses himself. Obviously, if all men
have common inherited patterns of emotional
and mental behavior (which Jung called the
archetypes), it is only to be expected that we
shall find their products (symbolic fantasies,
thoughts, and actions) in practically every field
of human activity.

Important modern investigations of many of
these fields have been deeply influenced by
Jung’s work. For instance, this influence can be
seen in the study of literature, in such books as
J. B. Priestley’s Literature and Western Man ,
Gottfried Diener’s Fausts Weg zu Helena , or
James Kirsch’s Shakespeare's Hamlet. Simi-
larly, Jungian psychology has contributed to the
study of art, as in the writings of Herbert Read
or of Aniela Jaffe, Erich Neumann’s examina-
tion of Henry Moore, or Michael Tippett’s
studies in music. Arnold Toynbee’s work on his-
tory and Paul Radin’s on anthropology have
benefited from Jung’s teachings, as have the
contributions to sinology made by Richard Wil-
helm, Enwin Rousselle, and Manfred Porkert.

Sound waves, given off by a
vibrating steel disk and made
visible in a photograph, produce
a strikingly mandala-like pattern.

304

Of course, this does not mean that the special
features of art and literature (including their
interpretations) can be understood only from
their archetypal foundation. These fields all
have their own laws of activity; like all really
creative achievements, they cannot ultimately
be rationally explained. But within their areas of
action one can recognize the archetypal patterns
as a dynamic background activity. And one can
often decipher in them (as in dreams) the mes-
sage of some seemingly purposive, evolutionary
tendency of the unconscious.

The fruitfulness of Jung’s ideas is more imme-
diately understandable within the area of the
cultural activities of man: Obviously, if the
archetypes determine our mental behavior, they
must appear in all these fields. But, unexpect-
edly, Jung’s concepts have also opened up new
ways of looking at things in the realm of the
natural sciences as well — for instance, in
biology.

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli has pointed out
that, due to new discoveries, our idea of the
evolution of life requires a revision that might
take into account an area of interrelation be-
tween the unconscious psyche and biological
processes. Until recently it was assumed that the
mutation of species happened at random and
that a selection took place by means of which
the “meaningful,” well-adapted varieties sur-
vived, and the others disappeared. But modern
evolutionists have pointed out that the selections
of such mutations by pure chance would have
taken much longer than the known age of our
planet allows.

Jung’s concept of synchronicity may be help-
ful here, for it could throw light upon the occur-
rence of certain rare “border-phenomena,” or
exceptional events; thus it might explain how
“meaningful” adaptations and mutations could
happen in less time than that required by en-
tirely random mutations. Today we know of
many instances in which meaningful “chance”
events have occurred when an archetype is acti-
vated. For example, the history of science con-
tains many cases of simultaneous invention or
discovery. One of the most famous of such cases
involved Darwin and his theory of the origin of

species: Darwin had developed the theory in a
lengthy essay, and in 1844 was busy expanding
this into a major treatise.

While he was at work on this project he
received a manuscript from a young biologist,
unknown to Darwin, named A. R. Wallace.
The manuscript was a shorter but otherwise
parallel exposition of Darwin’s theory. At the
time Wallace was in the Molucca Islands of the
Malay Archipelago. He knew of Darwin as a
naturalist, but had not the slightest idea of the
kind of theoretical work on which Darwin was
at the time engaged.

In each case a creative scientist had inde-
pendently arrived at a hypothesis that was to
change the entire development of the science.
And each had initially conceived of the hypo-
thesis in an intuitive “flash” (later backed up
by documentary evidence) . The archetypes thus
seem to appear as the agents, so to speak, of a
creatio continua. (What Jung calls synchronistic
events are in fact something like “acts of crea-
tion in time.”)

Similar “meaningful coincidences” can be
said to occur when there is a vital necessity for
an individual to know about, say, a relative’s
death, or some lost possession. In a great many
cases such information has been revealed by
means of extrasensory perception. This seems
to suggest that abnormal random phenomena
may occur when a vital need or urge is aroused ;
and this in turn might explain why a species of
animals, under great pressure or in great need,
could produce “meaningful” (but acausal )
changes in its outer material structure.

But the most promising field for future studies
seems (as Jung saw it) to have unexpectedly
opened up in connection with the complex field
of microphysics. At first sight, it seems most un-
likely that we should find a relationship between
psychology and microphysics. The interrelation
of these sciences is worth some explanation.

The most obvious aspect of such a connection
lies in the fact that most of the basic concepts
of physics (such as space, time, matter, energy,
continuum or field, particle, etc.) were origin-
ally intuitive, semi-mythological, archetypal
ideas of the old Greek philosophers — ideas that

306

then slowly evolved and became more accurate
and that today are mainly expressed in abstract
mathematic al terms. 'The idea of a particle, for
instance, was formulated by the fourth-century
b.c. Greek philosopher Leucippus and his pupil
Democritus, who called it the “atom” — i.e. the
“indivisible unit.” Though the atom has not
proved indivisible, we still conceive matter ulti-
mately as consisting of waves and particle's (or
discontinuous “quanta”).

The idea of energy, and its relationship to
force and movement, was also formulated by
early Greek thinkers, and was developed by
Stoic philosophers. They postulated the exist-
ence of a sort of life-giving “tension” (tonos),
which supports and moves all things. This is
obviously a semi-mythological germ of our
modern concept of energy.

Even comparatively modern scientists and
thinkers have relied on half-mythological,
archetypal images when building up new con-
cepts. In the 17th century, for instance, the
absolute validity of the law of causality seemed
“proved” to Rene Descartes “by the fact that
God is immutable in His decisions and actions.”
And the great German astronomer Johannes
Kepler asserted that there are not more and not
less than three dimensions of space on account
of the Trinity.

These are just two examples among many
that show how even our modern and basic
scientific concepts remained for a long time
linked with archetypal ideas that originally
came from the unconscious. They do not neces-
sarily express “objective” facts (or at least we
cannot prove that they ultimately do) butspring
from innatemental tendenciesinman — tenden-

cies that induce him to find “satisfactory”
rational explanatory connections between the
various outer and inner facts with which he has
to deal. When examining nature and the uni-
verse, instead of looking for and finding objec-
tive qualities, “man encounters himself,” in the
phrase of the physicist Werner Heisenberg.

Because of the implications of this point of
view, Wolfgang Pauli and other scientists have
begun to study the role of archetypal symbolism
in the realm of scientific concepts. Pauli be-
lieved that we should parallel our investigation
of outer objects with a psychological investiga-
tion of the inner origin of our scientific con-
cepts. (This investigation might shed new light
on a far-reaching concept to be introduced later
in this chapter - the concept of a “one-ness”
between the physical and psychological spheres,
quantitative and qualitative aspects of reality.)

Besides this rather obvious link between the
psychology of the unconscious and physics, there,
are other even more fascinating connections.
Jung (working closely with Pauli) discovered
that analytical psychology has been forced by
investigations in its own field to create concepts
that turned out later to be strikingly similar to
those created by the physicists when confronted
with microphysical phenomena. Oneofthemost
important among the physicists’ concepts is
Niels Bohr’s idea of complementarity.

Modern microphysics has discovered that one
can describe light only by means of two logic-
ally opposed but complementary concepts : The
ideas of particle and wave. In grossly simplified
terms, it might be said that under certain ex-
perimental conditions light manifests itself as if
it were composed of particles; under others, as

The American physicist Mrs. Maria
Mayer, who in 1 963 shared the Nobel
prize for physics. Her discovery —
concerning the constituents of the
atomic nucleus— was made like so
many other scientific discoveries:
in an intuitive flash of insight
(sparked by a colleague's chance
remark). Her theory indicates that
the nucleus consists of concentric
shells: The innermost contains two
protons or two neutrons, the next
contains eight of one or the other,
and so on through what she calls the
"magic numbers '— 20, 28, 50, 82, 1 26.

There is an obvious link between this
model and the archetypes of the
sphere and of numbers

if it were a wave. Also, it was discovered that we
can accurately observe either the position or the
velocity of a subatomic particle — but not both
at once. The observer must choose his experi-
mental set-up, but by doing so he excludes (or
rather must “sacrifice”) some other possible set-
up and its results. Furthermore, the measuring
apparatus has to be included in the description
of events because it has a decisive but uncontrol-
lable influence upon the experimental set-up.

Pauli says: “The science of microphysics, on
account of the basic ‘complementary’ situation,
is faced with the impossibility of eliminating the
effects of the observer by determinable correc-
tives and has therefore to abandon in principle
any objective understanding of physical pheno-
mena. Where classical physics still saw ‘deter-
mined causal natural laws of nature’ we now
look only for ‘statistical laws’ with ‘primary
possibilities.’ ”

In other words, in microphysics the observer
interferes with the experiment in a way that
cannot be measured and that therefore cannot
be eliminated. No natural laws can be formu-
lated, saying “such-and-such will happen in
every case.” All the microphysicist can say is
“such-and-such is, according to statistical
probability, likely to happen.” This naturally
represents a tremendous problem for our
classical physical thinking. It requires a con-
sideration, in a scientific experiment, of the
mental outlook of the participant-observer: It
could thus be said that scientists can no longer
hope to describe any aspects of outer objects in
a completely “objective 1 * manner.

Most modern physicists have accepted the
fact that the role played by the conscious ideas
of an observer in every microphysical experi-
ment cannot be eliminated; but they have not
concerned themselves with the possibility that
the total psychological condition (both conscious
and unconscious) of the observer might play a
role as well. As Pauli points out, however, we
have at least no a priori reasons for rejecting
this possibility. But we must look at this as a still
unanswered and an unexplored problem.

Bohr’s idea of complementarity is especially
interesting to Jungian psychologists, for Jung

saw that the relationship between the conscious
and unconscious mind also forms a complemen-
tary pair of opposites. Each new content that
comes up from the unconscious is altered in its
basic nature by being partly integrated into the
conscious mind of the observer. Even dream
contents (if noticed at all) are in that way
semi-conscious. And each enlargement of the
observer’s consciousness caused by dream inter-
pretation has again an immeasurable repercus-
sion and influence on the unconscious. Thus the
unconscious can only be approximately de-
scribed (like the particles of microphysics) by
paradoxical concepts. What it really is “in
itself” we shall never know, just as we shall
never know this about matter.

To take the parallels between psychology and
microphysics even further: What Jung calls the
archetypes (or patterns of emotional and mental
behavior in man) could just as well be called,
to use Pauli’s term, “primary possibilities” of
psychic reactions. As has been stressed in this
book, there are no laws governing the specific
form in which an archetype might appear.
There are only “tendencies” (see p. 67) that,
again, enable us to say only that such-and-such
is likely to happen in certain psychological
situations.

As the American psychologist William James
once pointed out, the idea of an unconscious
could itself be compared to the “field” concept
in physics. We might say that, just as in a mag-
netic field the particles entering into it appear
in a certain order, psychological contents also
appear in an ordered way within that psychic
area which we call the unconscious. If we call
something “rational” or “meaningful” in our
conscious mind, and accept it as a satisfactory
“explanation” of things, it is probably due to
the fact that our conscious explanation is in
harmony with some prcconscious constellation
of contents in our unconscious.

In other words, our conscious representations
are sometimes ordered (or arranged in a pat-
tern) before they have become conscious to us.
The 19 th-century German mathematician Karl
Friedrich Gauss gives an example of an experi-
ence of such an unconscious order of ideas: He

308

says that he found a certain rule in the theory
of numbers “not by painstaking research, but
by the Grace of God, so to speak. The riddle
solved itself as lightning strikes , and I myself
could not tell or show the connection between
what I knew before, what I last used to experi-
ment with, and what produced the final suc-
cess.” The French scientist Henri Poincare is
even more explicit about this phenomenon; he
describes how during a sleepless night he actu-
ally watched his mathematical representations
colliding in him until some of them “found a
more stable connection. One feels as if one
could watch one’s own unconscious at work, the
unconscious activity partially becoming mani-
fest to consciousness without losing its own
character. At such moments one has an intui-
tion of the difference between the mechanisms
of the two egos.”

As a final example of parallel developments
in microphysics and, psychology, we can con-
sider Jung’s concept of meaning . Where before
men looked for causal (i.e. rational) explana-
tions of phenomena, Jung introduced the idea
of looking for the meaning (or, perhaps we
could say, the “purpose”). That is, rather than
ask why something happened (i.e. what caused
it), Jung asked : What did it happen for? This
same tendency appears in physics: Many
modern physicists are now looking more for
“connections” in nature than for causal laws
(determinism).

Pauli expected that the idea of the uncon-
scious would spread beyond the “narrow frame
of therapeutic use” and would influence all
natural sciences that deal with general life
phenomena. Since Pauli suggested this develop-
ment he has been echoed by some physicists who
are concerned with the new science of cyberne-
tics— the comparative study of the “control”
system formed by the brain and nervous system
and such mechanical or electronic information
and control systems as computers. In short, as
the modern French scientist Oliver Costa de
Beauregard has put it, science and psychology
should in future “enter into an active dialogue.”

The unexpected parallelisms of ideas in
psychology and physics suggest, as Jung pointed

out, a possible ultimate one-ness of both fields of
reality that physics and psychology study — i.e.
a psychophysical one-ness of all life phenomena.
Jung was even convinced that what he calls
the unconscious somehow links up with the
structure of inorganic matter— a link to which
the problem of so-called “psychosomatic” ill-
ness seems to point. The concept of a Unitarian
idea of reality (which has been followed up by
Pauli and Erich Neumann) was called by Jung
the urns mundus (the one world, within which
matter and psyche are not yet discriminated or
separately actualized). He paved the way to-
ward such a Unitarian point of view by pointing
out that an archetype shows a “psychoid” (i.e.
not purely psychic but almost material) aspect
when it appears within a synchronistic event —
for such an event is in effect a meaningful
arrangement of inner psychic and outer facts.

In other words, the archetypes not only fit
into outer situations (as animal patterns of be-
havior fit into their surrounding nature) ; at
bottom they tend to become manifest in a syn-
chronistic “arrangement” that includes both
matter and psyche. But these statements are just
hints at some directions in which the investiga-
tion of life phenomena might proceed. Jung
felt that we should first learn a great deal more
about the interrelation of these two areas (mat-
ter and psyche) before rushing into too many
abstract speculations about it.

The field that Jung himself felt would be most
fruitful for further investigations was the study
of our basic mathematical axiomata — which
Pauli calls “primary mathematical intuitions,”
and among which he especially mentions the
ideas of an infinite series of numbers in arith-
metic, or of a continuum in geometry, etc. As
the German-born author Hannah Arendt has
said, “with the rise of modernity, mathematics
do not simply enlarge their content or reach out
into the infinite to become applicable to the
immensity of an infinite and infinitely growing,
expanding universe, but cease to be concerned
with appearance at all. They are no longer the
beginnings of philosophy, or the ‘science’ of
Being in its true appearance, but become
instead the science of the structure of the

309

human mind.” (A Jungian would at once add
the question: Which mind? The conscious or
the unconscious mind?)

As we have seen with reference to the
experiences of Gauss arid Poincare, the mathe-
maticians also discovered the fact that our
representations are “ordered” before we become
aware of them. B. L. van der Waerden, who
cites many examples of essential mathematical
insights arising from the unconscious, concludes:
“. . . the unconscious is not only able to associate
and combine, but even to judge. The judgment of
the unconscious is an intuitive one, but it is under
favorable circumstances completely sure.”

Among the many mathematical primary in-
tuitions, or a priori ideas, the “natural num-
bers” seem psychologically the most interesting.
Not only do they serve our conscious everyday
measuring and counting operations; they have
for centuries been the only existing means for
“reading” the meaning of such ancient forms of
divination as astrology, numerology, geomancy,
etc. — all of which are based on arithmetical
computation and all of which have been inves-
tigated by Jung in terfns of his theory of syn-
chronicity. Furthermore, the natural numbers
— viewed from a psychological angle — must cer-
tainly be archetypal representations, for we are
forced to think about them in certain definite
ways. Nobody, for instance, can deny that 2 is
the only existing even primary number, even if
he has never thought about it consciously
before. In other words, numbers are not con-
cepts consciously invented by men for purposes
of calculation: They are spontaneous and
autonomous products of the unconscious — as
are other archetypal symbols.

But the natural numbers are also qualities
adherent to outer objects: We can assert and
count that there are two stones here or three
trees there. Even if we strip outer objects of all
such qualities as color, temperature, size, etc.,
there still remains their “many-ness” or special
multiplicity. Yet these same numbers are also
just as indisputably parts of our own mental
set-up — abstract concepts that we can study
without looking at outer objects. Numbers thus
appear to be a tangible connection between the

spheres of matter and psyche. According to hints
dropped by Jung, it is here that the most fruit-
ful field of further investigation might be found.

I mention these rather difficult concepts
briefly in order to show that, to me, Jung’s ideas
do not form a “doctrine” but are the beginning
of a new outlook that will continue to evolve
and expand. I hope they will give the reader
a glimpse into what seems to me to have been
essential to and typical of Jung’s scientific atti-
tude. He was always searching, with unusual
freedom from conventional prejudices, and at
the same time with great modesty and accuracy,
to understand the phenomenon of life. He did
not go further into the ideas mentioned above,
because he felt that he had not yet enough
facts in hand to say anything relevant about
them — just as he generally waited several years
before publishing his new insights, checking
them again and again in the meantime, and
himself raising every possible doubt about them.

Therefore, what might at first sight strike the
reader as a certain vagueness in his ideas comes
in fact from this scientific attitude of intellectual
modesty - - an attitude that does not exclude (by
rash, superficial pseudo-explanations and over-
simplifications) new possible discoveries, and
that respects the complexity of the phenomenon
of life. For this phenomenon was always an
exciting mystery to Jung. It was never, as it is
for people with closed minds, an “explained”
reality about which it can be assumed that we
know everything.

Creative ideas, in my opinion, show their
value in that, like keys, they help to “unlock”
hitherto unintelligible connections of facts and
thus enable man to penetrate deeper into the
mystery of life. I am convinced that Jung’s
ideas can serve in this way to find and interpret
new facts in many fields of science (and also of
everyday life), simultaneously leading the indi-
vidual to a more balanced, more ethical, and
wider conscious outlook. If the reader should
feel stimulated to work further on the investi-
gation and assimilation of the unconscious —
which always begins by working on oneself —
the purpose of this introductory book would be
fulfilled.

3 l °

Notes

Approaching the unconscious C. G. Jung
page 37 Nietzsche’s cryptomnesia is discussed in Jung’s
“On the Psychology of So-called Occult Phenomena,” in
Collected Works vol. I. The relevant passage from the
ship’s log and the corresponding passage from Nietzsche
are as follows :

From J. Kerner, Blatter aus Brevorst , vol. IV, p. 5)7,
headed “An Kxtract of Awe-inspiring Import . . (orig.
1831-37) : “ File four captains and a merchant, Mr. Bell,
went ashore on the island of Mount Stromboli to shoot
rabbits. At three o'clock they mustered the crew to go
aboard, when, to their inexpressible astonishment, they
saw two men flying rapidly toward them through the air.
One was dressed in black, the other in grey. They came
past them very closely, in greatest haste, and to their
utmost dismay descended into the crater of the terrible
volcano, Mount Stromboli. They recognized the pair as
acquaintances from London.”

From F. Nietzsche, 7 hus Spake kfaralhuslra, chapter xl,
“Great Events” (translated by Common, p. 180, slightly
modified), orig. 1883: “Now about the time that Zara-
thustra sojourned on the Happy Isles, it happened that
a ship anchored at the isle on which the smoking moun-
tain stands, and the crew went ashore to shoot rabbits.
About the noon-tide hour, however, when the captain
and his men were together again, they suddenly saw a
man coming toward them through the air, and a voice
said distinctly: 'It is time! It is highest time!’

But when the figure drew close to them, flying past
quickly like a shadow in the direction of the volcano,
they recognized with the greatest dismay that it was
Zarathustra . . . ‘Behold,’ said the old helmsman, Zara-
thustra goes down to hell !’

38 Robert Louis Stevenson discusses his dream of
Jekyll and Hyde in “A Chapter on Dreams” from his
Across the. Plain.

56 A more detailed account of Jung’s dream is given
in Memories , Dreams , Reflections of C. C. Jung, ed. Aniela
Jaffe, New York, Pantheon, 1962.

63 I Examples of the state of subliminal ideas and images
can be found in Pierre Janet’s works.

93 Furt her examples of cultural symbols appear in
Mircea Eliade’s Der Schamanismus, Zurich. 1947.

See also The Collected Works of Carl G. Jung, vols.
I-XV1II; London, Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York,
Boll ingen- Pantheon.

Ancient myths and modern man Joseph L. Henderson

108 ( Concerning the finality of Christ’s resurrection:

(Christianity is an eschatological religion, meaning it
has a final end in view that becomes synonymous with
the Last Judgment. Other religions, in which matri-
archal elements of tribal culture are preserved (e.g.

Orphism ), are cyclical, as demonstrated by Eliade in
The Myth of the Eternal Return , New York, Bollingen-
Panthcon, 1954.

112 See Paul Radin, Hero Cycles of the Winnebago,

Indiana University Publications, 1948.

113 Concerning Hare, Dr. Radin remarks: “Hare is the
typical hero as we know him from all over the world,
civilized and pre-literate, and from the* most remote
periods of world history.”

114 The twin Navaho warrior gods are discussed by
Maud Oakes in Where the / wo Came to their Eat her . A
Navaho War Ceremonial, New York, Bollingen, 1943,

117 Jung discusses Trickster in “On the Psychology
of the Trickster Figure,” Collet ted Works vol. IX.

118 The ego's conflict with the shadow is discussed in
Jung’s “The Battle for Deliverance from the Mother,”
Collected Works vol. V.

125 F or an interpretation of the Minotaur myth, see
Mary Renault’s novel 7 he Ting Must Die , Pantheon, 1958.

125 The symbolism of the labyrinth is discussed by
Erich Neumann in The Origins and History of Conscious-
ness, Bollingen, 1954.

126 F or the Navaho myth of Coyote, see Margaret
Schevill Link and J. L. Henderson, The Pollen Path .
Stanford, 1954.

128 The emergence of the ego is discussed by Erich
Neumann, op. e/7.; Michael Fordham, New Developments
in Analytical Psychology, London, Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1957; and Esther M. Harding, 'The Restoration

of the Injured Archetypal Image (privately circulated;.

New York, 1960.

129 Jung’s study of initiation appears in “Analytical
Psychology and the Weltanschauung,” Collected Works
vol. VIII. See also Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of
Passage, Chicago, 1961.

132 Women’s trials of strength are discussed by Erich
Neumann in Amor and Psyche, Bollingen, 1956.

137 The tale of “Beauty and the Beast” appears in Mme.
Leprince de Beaumont’s The Eairy 'Tale Book, New York.
Simon & Schuster, 1958.

141 The myth of Orpheus can be found in Jane E.
Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Creek Religion,
Cambridge University Press, 1922. See also W. K. (’.
Guthrie, Orpheus and Creek Religion, Cambridge, 1935.

142 Jung’s discussion of the Catholic ritual of the
chalice is in “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass,”
Collected Works vol. XL Set* also Alan Watts, Xlyth
and Ritual in Christianity , Vanguard Press, 1953.

145 Linda Fierz-David's interpretation of Orphic
ritual appears in Psychologische Betrachtungen zu der
Freskenfolge der Villa dei Misteri in Potnpeji. ein Versuch
von Linda Tier. z- David, trans. Gladys Phelan (privately
printed), Zurich, 1957.

148 The Roman funeral urn from the Esq inline Hill is
discussed by Jane Harrison, op. cil.

149 See Jung’s “ The Transcendent Function,” edited by
the Students’ Association, C. G. Jung Institute, Zurich.

151 Joseph Campbell discusses the shaman as bird in
The Symbol without Meaning , Zurich, Rhein- Verlag, 1958.

152 For T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” see his
Collected Poems, London, Faber and Faber, 1963.

The process of individuation M.-L. von Franz

160 A detailed discussion of the meandering pattern of
dreams appears in Jung’s Collected Works vol. VIII,

p. 23 ff. and pp. 237-300 (especially p. 290). For an
example see Jung’s Collected Works vol. XII, part 1.

See also Gerhard Adler, Studies in Analytical Psychology,
London, 1948.

161 I or Jung’s discussion of the Self, see Collected
Works vol. IX, part 2, pp. 5 If., 23 If. ; and vol. XII,
pp. 18 f, 41 f., 174, 193.

161 The Naskapi are described by Frank (J. Speck in
Naskapi : ‘ The Savage. Hunter of the Labrador Peninsula,
University of Oklahoma Press, 1935.

162 The concept of psychic wholeness is discussed in
Jung’s Collected Works vol. XIV, p. 117, and in vol
IX, part 2, p. 6, 190. See also Collected Works vol.

IX, part I, pp. 275 ff., 290 ff.

163 Th e story of the oak tree is translated from
Richard Wilhelm, Dschuang-Dsi ; Das wahre Bitch vow
\i\dhchen B Hit end! and, Jena, 1923, pp. 33-4.

163 Ju ng deals with the tree as a symbol of' the indiv-
iduation process in “Der philosophisehe Baum,” Von
den Wurzeln des Bewusslseins , Zuric'h, 1954 (not yet
translated).

163 The “local god” to whom sacrifices were made on
the stone earth-altar corresponds in many respects to
the antique genius loci. See Henri Maspero, La Chine
antique , Paris, 1955, p. 140 f. (This information

is owed to the kindness of Miss A*riane Rump. )

164 Jung notes the difficulty of describing the individ-
uation process in Collected Works vol. XVII, p. 179.

165 This brief description of the importance of
children’s dreams derives mostly 'from Jung’s Psycho-
logical Interpretation of Children's Dreams (notes and
lectures), E. T. H. Zurich, 1938-9 (private circulation
only). The special example comes from an untranslated
seminar, Psychologische Interpretation von Kinder traumen,
1939-40, p. 76 ff. See also Jung’s “The Development of
Personality,” Collected Works vol. XVII; Michael
Fordham, The Life of Childhood, Condon, 1944 (especially
p. 104) ; Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of
Consciousness', Frances Wickes, Lite Inner World of
Consciousness, New York-Eondon, 1927; and

Eleanor Bertine, Human Relationships , Condon, 1958.

166 Jung discusses the psychic nucleus in “The Develop-
ment of Personality,” Collected Works vol. XVII,

p. 175, and vol. XIV, p. 9 ff.

167 E or fairy tale patterns corresponding to the sick
king motif, see Joh. Bolte and G. Polivka, Anmerkungen
zu den Kinder- und Hausmarchen der Br'uder Grimm , vol. I,
1913-32, p. 503 ff. i.e. all variations to Grimm’s
tale The Golden Bird.

168 Further discussion of the shadow can be found in
Jung’s Collected Works vol. IX, part 2, chapter 2, and
vol. XII, p. 29 f., and idem: The Undiscovered Self ,

London, 1958, pp. 8-9. See also Frances Wickes,

The Inner World of Man. New York-Toronto, 1938.

A good example of shadow realization is given in
G. Schmalz, Komplexe Psychologie und Korperliches Symptom,
Stuttgart, 1955.

170 E xamples of the Egyptian Concept of the under-
world appear in 'The Tomb of Rameses VI, Bollingen
series XL, parts 1 and 2, Pantheon Books, 1954.

172 Jung deals with the nature of projection in
Collected Works vol. VI, Definitions, p. 582; and
Collected Works vol. VIII, p. 272 ff.

175 The Koran (Qur’an) has hreen translated by E. H.
Palmer, Oxford University Press, 1949. See also
Jung’s interpretation of the story-of Moses and Khidr
in Collected Works vol. IX, p. 135 ff.

175 The Indian story Somadeva : V elalapanchavimsali
has been translated by C. H. Tawney, Jaico-book,
Bombay, 1956. See also Henry Zimmer’s excellent
psychological interpretation The King and the Corpse,
Bollingen series IX, New York, Pantheon, 1948.

176 The reference to the Zen master is from Der Ochs
und sein Hirte (trans. by Koichi Tsujimura), Pfullingen,
1958, p. 95.

177 For further discussion of the anima, see Jung’s
Collected Works vol. IX, part 2, pp. 1 1-12, and chapter
3; vol. XVII, p. 198 f.; vol. VIII, p. 345; vol. XI,

pp. 29-31, 41 fi, 476, etc.; vol. XII, Part 1. See
also Emma Jung, Animus and Anima, Two Essays, The
Analy tical Club of New York, 1957; Eleanor Bertine,
Human Relationships, part 2; Esther Harding, Psychic
Energy, New York, 1948, passim, -and others.

177 Eskimo shamanism has been described by Mircea
Eliade in Der Schamanismus, Zurich, 1947, especially

p. 49 ff. ; and by Knud Rasmussen in Thulefahrt,
Frankfurt, 1926, passim.

178 The Siberian hunter story is from Rasmussen,

Die Gabe des Adlers, Frankfurt a.M., 1926, p. 172.

179 A discussion of the “poison damsel” appears in W.
Hertz, Die Sage vom Gifimddchen, Abh. der k. bayr. Akad.
der Wiss., 1 Cl. XX Bd. 1 Abt. Miinchen, 1893.

179 The murderous princess is discussed by Chr. Hahn
in Griechische und Albanesische Mdrchen, vol. 1, Munchen-
Berlin, 1918, p. 301 : Der Jager und der Spiegel

der alles sieht.

180 “Love madness” caused by an anima projection is
examined in Eleanor Bertine’s Human Relationships,

p. 1 13 sq. See also Dr. H. Strauss’ excellent paper
“Die Anima als Projections-erlebnis,” unpublished ms.,
Heidelberg, 1959.

180 Jung discusses the possibility of psychic integra-
tion through a negative anima in Collected Works
vol. IX, p^ 224 sq.; vol. XI, p. 164 ff . ; vol. XII,
pp. 25 sq., 1 1 0 sq., 128.

185 I or the four stages of the anima, see Jung’s
Collected Works vol. XVI, p. 174.

186 Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerolomachia has been
interpreted by Linda Fierz-David in Der Liebestraum des
Poliphilo , Zurich, 1947.

186 The quotation describing the role of the animads
from Aurora Consurgens I, translated by E. A. Glover
(English translation in preparation). German edition
by M.-L. von Franz, in Jung’s Mys ter turn Coniunctionis ,
vol. 3, 1958.

187 Jung has examined the knightly cult of the lady
in Collected Works vol. VI, p. 274 and 290 sq. See

also Emma Jung and M.-E. von Franz, Die Graalslegende
in psychologischer Sichl, Zurich, 1960.

189 For the animus’ appearance as a “sacred convic-
tion,” see Jung’s Two Essays in Analytical Psychology ,
London, 1928, p. 127 ff . ; Collected Works vol. IX,
chapter 3. See also Emma Jung, Animus and Anima ,
passim; Esther Harding, Woman's Mysteries, New York,
1955; Eleanor Bertine, Human Relationships, p. 128
ff. ; Toni Wolff, Sludien zu C. G. Jung's Psychologic ,

Zurich, 1959, p. 257 ff . ; Erich Neumann, fur Psychologic
des Weiblichen , Zurich, 1953.

189 The gypsy fairy tale can be found in Der Tod
als Geliebler, Zigeuner-Marchen. Die Mdrchen der W ell-
lit eralur, ed. F. von der Leyen and P. Zaunert, Jena,

1926, p. 1 17 sq.

194 Th e animus as provider of valuable masculine
qualities is dealt with by Jung in Collected Works vol.

IX, p. 182 sq., and idem: Two Essays, Chapter 4.

196 F or the Austrian tale of the black princess, see
“Die schwarze Konigstochter,” Mdrchen aus dem Donau-
lande , Die Mdrchen der Weltliteratur, Jena, 1926, p. 150 sq.
196 The Eskimo tale of the Moon Spirit is from “Von
einer Frau die zur Spinne wurde,” translated from K.
Rasmussen, Die Gabe des Adlers , p. 121 sq.

196 A discussion of the Selfs young-old personifica-
tions appears in Jung’s Collected Works vol. IX, p. 151 sq
200 The myth of P’an Ku can be found in Donald A.
MacKenzie’s Myths of China and Japan, London, p. 260,
and in If Maspero’s Le Taoisme , Paris, 1950, p. 109. See
also J. ]. M. de Groot, Universismus , Berlin, 1918, pp,

130 31 ; H. Kocstler, Symbolik des Chinesischen Univer-
sismus, Stuttgart, 1958, p. 40; and Jung’s Mysterium
Coniunctionis, vol. 2, pp. 160-6E

200 For discussion of Adam as Cosmic Man, see August
Wunsche, Schopfung und Sunden fall des ersten Menschen.
Leipzig, 1906, pp. 8-9 and p. 13; Hans Eeisegang. Die

312

Gnosis , Leipzig, Kronersche Taschenausgabe. For the
psychological interpretation see Jung’s Myslerium.
Coniunctionis, vol. 2, chapter 5, pp. 140-99; and
Collected Works vol. XII, p. 346 sq. There may
also be historical connections between the Chinese P’an
Ku, the Persian Gayomart, and the legends of Adam; see
Sven S. Hartmann, Gayomar /, Uppsala, 1953, pp. 46, 1 15.
202 The concept of Adam as “super-soul,” coming from
a date palm, is dealt with by K. S. D rower in The Secret
Adam , A Study of Nasoraean Gnosis , Oxford, 1960, pp. 23,

26, 27, 37.

202 The quotation from Meister Eckhart is from F.
Pfeiffer’s Master Eckhardl , trans. C. de B. Evans,

London, 1924, vol. II, p. 80.

202 For Jung’s discussions of Cosmic Man, see
Collected Works vol. IX, part 2, p. 36 sq.; “Answer to Job,”
Collected Works vol. XI, and Myslerium Coniunctionis ,
vol. 2, p. 215 scj. See also Esther Harding, Journey into
Self, London, 1956, passim.

202 Adam Kadmon is discussed in Gershom Sholem’s
Major Trends m Jewish Mysticism , 1941 ; and Jung’s
Myslerium Gomunct toms , vol. 2, p. 182 sq.

204 The symbol of the royal couple is examined in
Jung’s Collected Works vol. XVI, p. 313, and in
Myslerium Coniunctionis , vol. 1, pp. 143, 179; vol. 2, pp.

86, 90, 140, 285. See also Plato's Symposium , and the
Gnostic God-man, the Anthropos figure.

205 For the stone, as a symbol of the Self, see Jung's
Von den Wurze-ln des Bewusstseins , Zurich, 1954, pp. 200
sq., 415 sq., and 449 sq. (not yet translated).

206 The point where the urge to individuate is
consciously realized is discussed in Jung’s Collected
Works vol. XII, passim, Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins ,
p. 200 sq. ; Collected Works vol. IX, part 2, pp. 139 sq.,

236, 247 sq., 268; Collected Works vol. XVI, p.

164 sq. See also Collected Works vol. VIII, p. 253
sq.; and Toni Wolff, Studien zu C. G. Jung's Psychologic,
p. 43. See also, essentially, Jung’s Myslerium Coniunctionis ,
vol. 2, p. 318 sq.

207 For an extended discussion of “active imagination,”
see Jung’s “The T ranscendent Function,” in Collected
Works vol. VIII.

207 The zoologist Adolf Portmann describes animal
“inwardness” in Das Tier a/s soziales Wesen, Zurich,

1953, p. 366.

209 Ancient German beliefs concerning tombstones are
discussed in Paul Herrmann’s Das all Germanise he Priester-
wesen, Jena, 1929, p. 52; and in Jung’s Von den Wurzeln
des Bewusstseins , p. 198 sq.

210 Moi ienus’s description of the philosophers’ stone is
quoted in Jung’s Collected Works vol. XII, p. 300, note 45.
210 That suffering is necessary to find the stone is

an alchemical dictum; compare Jung’s Collected Works
vol. XII, p. 280 sq.

210 Jung discusses the relationship between psyche and
matter in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology , pp. 142-46.

211 For a full explanation of synchronicity, see Jung’s
“Synchronicity: an Acausal Connecting Principle,” in
Collected Works vol. VIII, p. 419 sq.

212 For Jung’s views on turning to Eastern religion
in order to contact the unconscious, see' “Concerning
Mandala Symbolism,” Collected Works vol. IX, part 1,
p. 335 sq., and vol. XII, p. 212 sq. (Of the latter, see
also pp. 19, 42, 91 sq., 101, 1 19 sq., 159, 162,)

212 The excerpt from the Chinese text is from Lu K'uan
Yu, Charles Luk, Ch’an and Zen Teaching, London, p. 27.
216 The tale of the Bath Badgerd is from Marchen a us
Iran , Die Marchen der Weltlileratur, Jena, 1959, p. 150 sq.

217 Jung examines the modern feeling of being a “statis-
tical cipher” in The Undiscovered Self , pp. 14, 109.

220 Dream interpretation on the subjective level is
discussed in Jung’s Collected Works vol. VIII, p. 266 and
vol. XVI, p.‘ 243.

220 That man is instinctively “in tune” with his sur-
roundings is discussed by A. Portmann in Das Tier a/s
soziales Wesen, p. 65 sq. and passim. See also N. Tinbergen,
A Study of Instinct , Oxford, 1955, pp. 151 sq. and 207 sq.

221 El. PL E. Hartley discusses the mass unconscious
in Fundamentals of Social Psychology, New York, 1952.

See also Eh. Janwitz and R. Schulze, Neue Richtungen in
der Massenkommunikalionforschung, Rundfunk und Fern-
sehen, 1960, pp. 7, 8 and passim. Also, ibid, pp.

1-20, and Unterschwellige Kommunikation, ibid., 1960,

Heft 3/4, p. 283 and p. 306. (This information is
owed to the kindness of Mr. Rene Malamoud.)

224 Th e value of freedom (to create something useful )
is stressed by Jung in The Undiscovered Self, p. 9.

224 F’or religious figures that symbolize the individua-
tion process, see Jung’s Collected Works vol. XI,

p. 273 and passim, and ibid.. Part 2 and p. 164 sep

225 Jung discusses religious symbolism in modern dreams
in Collected Works vol. XII, p. 92. See also ibid.,

pp. 28, 169 sq., 207, and others.

225 The addition of a fourth element to the Trinity is
examined by Jung in Myslerium Coniunctionis, vol. 2,
pp. 1 12 sq., 117sq., 123 sq. (not yet translated), and
Collected Works vol. VIII, p. 136 sq. and 160-62.

228 The vision of Black ETk is from Black Elk Speaks,
ed. John G. Neihardt, New York, 1932. German edition:
Schwarzer Hirsch: Ich rufe mein Volk, Olten, 1955.

228 The story of the FXkimo eagle festival is from
Knud Rasmussen, Die Gabe des Adlers , pp. 23 sq., 29 sq.

228 Jung discusses the reshaping of original mythological
material in Collected Works vol. XI, p. 20 sq., and

vol. XII, Introduction.

229 The physicist W. Pauli has described the effects
of modern scientific discoveries, like Heisenberg’s,

in Die Philosophische Bedeutung der Idee der Komple-
menlanldl, “FXperientia,” vol. VI/2, p. 72 sq.; and
m Wahrschednlichke.it und Phystk, “ DialiCticaT’ vol.

VI 1 1/2, 1954, p. 1 17.

Symbolism in the visual arts Aniela Jaffe

234 Max FTnst’s statement is quoted in C. Giedion-
Welcker, Contemporary Sculpture, New York, 1955.

234 Herbert Kuhn’s examination of prehistoric art
is in his Die Pelsbilder Europas, Stuttgart, 1952.

236 Concerning the No drama, compare I). Seckel,
Einfiihrung in die Kunst Ostasiens, Munich, 1960, figs.

1 e and 16. F’or the fox-mask used in No drama, see
G. Buschan, Tiere in Kult und Aberglauben , Ciba
Journal, Basle, Nov. 1942, no. 86.

237 For the animal attributes of various gods, see
G. Buschan, op. eft.

238 J ung discusses the symbolism of the unicorn (one
symbol of Christ) in Collected Works vol. XII, p. 415 ff.
240 F or the myth of Brahma, see H. Zimmer, Maya . der
indische Mythos, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1936.

240 The birth of Buddha appears in the Sanskrit
Lalila Vi stern . c. a.d. 600 to 1000; trans. Paris, 1884.

240 J ung discusses the four functions of consciousness
in Collected Works vol. VI.

240 Tibetan mandalas are discussed and interpreted in
Jung’s Collected Works vol. IX.

242 The picture of the Virgin in the center of a
circular tree is the central panel of the Triptyque du

3 1 3

Buisson Ardent , 1476, Cathedrale Saint-Saveur,

Aix-en- Provence.

242 Examples of sacred buildings with mandala
ground plans: Borobudur, Java ; the Taj Mahal; the
Omar Mosque in Jerusalem. Secular buildings: Castel del
Monte, built by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II
(1194-1250) in Apulia.

242 For the mandala in the foundation of primitive
villages and sacred places, see M. Eliade, Das Heilige
und das Profane , Hamburg, 1957.

242 The theory that quadrata means “quadripartite' - ’
was proposed by Franz Altheim, the Berlin classical
scholar. See K. Kerenyi, Introduction to Kcrenyi-Jung,
Einfuhrung in das Wesen der Mylhologie , Zurich, p. 20.

242 The other theory, that the urbs quadrata referred
to squaring the circle, is from Kerenyi, lac. cit.

243 For the Heavenly City, see Book of Revelation, XXI.
243 The quotation from Jung is from his Commentary

on the Secret of the Golden Flower , London-New York,

1956, 10th edition.

243 E xamples of the equilateral cross: crucifixion from
the Evangel ienharmonie, Vienna, Nat. Bib. Cod. 2687
(Otfried von Weissenberg, ninth century); Gosforth
cross, 10th century; the Monasterboice cross,

10th century; or the Ruthwell cross.

245 The discussion of the change in ecclesiastical
building is based on information in Karl Litz’s essay
Die Mandala , ein Beispiel der Archil eklursymboUk ,

Winterthur, November 1960.

247 Matisse’s Still Life ... is in the Thompson
Collection, Pittsburgh.

247 Kandinsky’s painting containing loose colored balls
or circles is entitled Blurred White , 1927, and is in the
Thompson Collection.

247 Paul Nash’s Event on the Downs is in Mrs. C.

Neilson’s collection. See George W. Digby, Meaning and
Symbol , Faber & F'aber, London.

249 Jung’s discussion of UFOs is in Flying Saucers:

A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies , London-
New York, 1959.

250 The quotation from Bazainc’s Notes sur la peinture
d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1953) was quoted in Walter
Hess, Dokumente zum Verstdndnis der modernen Malerei ,
Hamburg, 1958 (Rowohlt), p. 122. A number of
quotations in this chapter have been taken from this
extremely useful compilation, which will be referred to
hereafter as Dokumente.

250 Franz Marc’s statement is from Briefe, Aufzeichnungen
und Aphof/smen , Berlin, 1920.

250 For Kandinsky’s book, see sixth edition, Berne,

1959. (First edition, Munich, 1912.) Dokumente, p. 80.

250 Mannerism and modishness in modern art is
discussed by Werner Haftmann in Glanz und Gefahrdung
der Abstrakten Malerei , in Skizzenbuch zur Kultur der
Gegenwarl, Munich, 1960, p. 111. See also Haftmann’s
Die Malerei im. 20. Jahrhunderl , second edn., Munich,

1957 ; and Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern
Painting , London, 1959, and numerous individual studies.

251 Kandinsky’s essay “Uber die Formfrage” is in
Der blaue Reiter , Munich, 1912. See Dokumente , p. 87.

253 Bazaine’s comments on Duchamp’s bottle rack are
from Dokumente , p. 122.

253 Joan Miro’s statement is from Joan Mird , Horizont f
Collection, Arche Press.

254 The reference to Schwitters’ “obsession’’ is from
Werner Haftmann, op. cit.

254 Kandinsky’s statement is from Selbstbetrachlungen,
Berlin, 1913. Dokumente , p. 89.

254 The quotation from Carlo Carra is from W.
Haftmann’s Paul Klee , Wege bildnerischen Denkens , Munich,
1955, third edn., p. 7 1 .

254 The statement by Klee is from Wege des
Naturstudiums, Weimar, Munich, 1923. Dokumente , p. 125.
254 Bazaine’s remark is from Notes sur la peinture
d’aujourd’ hui, Paris, 1953. Dokumente , p. 125.

254 The statement by de Chirico is from Su/TArle
Metafisica , Rome, 1919. Dokumente , p. 112.

255 The quotations from de Chirico’s Memorie della mia
Vita are in Dokumente , p. 112.

255 Kandinsky’s statement about the death of God is
in his Ueber das Geislige in der Kunst, op. c/I.

255 Of the 19th-century European poets alluded to,
see especially Heinrich Heine, Rimbaud, and
Mallarme.

255 The quotation from Jung is from Collected Works
vol. XI, p. 88.

257 Artists in whose work manichini appear include
Carlo Carra, A. Archipenko (1887-1964), and Giorgio
Morandi (1890-1964).

257 The comment on Chagall by Herbert Read is from
his A Concise History of Modern Painting , London, 1959,
p. 124, 126, 128.

257 Andre Breton’s statements arc from Manifestes du
Surreal isme 1924-42, Paris, 1946. Dokumente , p. 117, 118.

258 The quotation from Ernst’s Beyond Painting (New
York, 1948) is in Dokumente , p. 119.

259 References to Hans Arp are based on Carola
Giedion-Welcker, Hans Arp, 1957, p. xvi.

259 Reference to Ernst’s Histoire Nalurelle is in
Dokumente , p. 121.

260 On the 19th-century Romantics and “nature’s
handwriting,’’ see Novalis, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais;

E. T. A. Hoffmann, Das Marchen vom Goldnen Topf\

G. H. von Schubert, Symbolik des Traumes.

260 Kassner’s comment on Georg Trakl is from
Almanach de la Librairie El inker , Paris, 1961.

262 Kandinsky’s statements are, respectively, from
Ruckblicke (quoted from Max Bill’s Introduction to
Kandinsky’s [Jeber das Geislige . . ., op. cit .) ; from
Selbsldarstellung, Berlin, 1913 ( Dokumente , p. 86);
and from Haftmann, Malerei im. 20. Jahrhundert.

262 F ranz Marc’s statements are respectively from
Briefe, Aufzeichnungen und Aphorismen, op. at . ;

Dokumente , p. 79 f . ; and from Haftmann, op. cit., p. 478.
262 Klee's statement is from IJeber die moderne Kunst,
Lecture, 1924. Dokumente, p. 84.

262 Mondrian’s statement is from Neue Gestaltung,
Munich, 1925. Dokumente, p. 100.

263 Kandinsky’s statements arc respectively from
Ueber das Geislige . . . , op. cit., p. 83; from Ueber die
Formfrage, Munich, 1912 ( Dokumente , p. 88 j; from
Ueber das Geislige . . . ( Dokumente , p. 88) ; and from
Aufsdtze, 1923-43 ( Dokumente , p. 91).

263 Franz Marc’s statement is quoted from Georg
Schmidt, Vom Sinn der Parallele in Kunst und Naturform ,
Basle, 1960.

263 Klee’s statements are respectively from Ueber die
Moderne Kunst , op. cit. ( Dokumente , p. 84) ; Tagebucher,
Berlin, 1953 ( Dokumente , p. 86) ; quoted from Haftmann,
Paul Klee , op. cit.. p. 93 and p. 50; Tagebucher, ( Dokumentee
p. 86) ; and Haftmann, p. 89.

264 Reference to Pollock's painting is in Haftmann,
Malerei im 20. Jahrhunderl, p. 464.

264 Pollock s statements are from My Painting.
Possibilities, New York, 1947. Quoted from Herbert Read,
op. cit., p. 267.

264 The quotation from Jung is from Collected Works
vol. IX, p. 173.

265 Read’s quotation of Klee is from Concise
History . . . , op. cit., p. 180.

265 Mare’s statement is from Briefe , Aufzeicftnungen und
Aphon smeit. Dokumente , p. 79.

265 The discussion of Marini is from Edouard Roditi,
Dialoge iiber Kunst , Inscl Verlag, 1960. (The conversation
is given here in a very abbreviated form. )

268 The statement by Manessier is quoted from
W. Haftmann, op. cit . , p. 474.

268 B a/.aine's comment is from his Notes sur la peinture
d'aujourd'hui , op. cit. Dokumente , p. 126.

270 The statement by Klee is from W. Haftmann,

Paul Klee , p. 71.

270 For reference to modern art in churches, see
W. Schmalenbach, JJur Ausslellung von Alfred Manessier ,
Zurich Art Gallery, 1959.

Symbols in an individual analysis Jolande Jacobi

273 The Palace of Dreams: a 16th-century illustration
to Book XIX of Homer’s Odyssey. In the center
niche stands the goddess of sleep holding a bouquet of
poppy flowers. On her left is the Gate of Horn (with the
head of a horned ox above it) ; from this gate come true
dreams: on her right the Gate of Ivory with an elephant’s
head above; from this gate come false dreams. Top left,
the goddess of the moon, Diana; top right, Night, with
the infants Sleep and Death.

277 Th e importance of the first dream in an analysis is
indicated bv Jung in Modern Man in Search of a Soul , p. 77.
290 Regarding the section on the Oracle Dream, see the
I Ching or Book of Changes , trans. Richard Wilhelm (with
an introduction by C. G. Jung), Routledge and Kegan
Paul, London, 1951, vols. I and II.

292 The symbolism in the three upper lines of the sign
Mcng the “gate” is mentioned in op. cit ., vol. II,
p. 299, which also states that this sign “. . . is a bypath,
it means little stones, doors and openings . . . eunuchs
and watchmen, the fingers ...” For the sign Meng, see
also vol. I, p. 20 ff.

292 Th e quotation from the / Ching is in vol. I, p. 23.

292 C Concerning a second consulting of the / Ching, J ung
writes (in his Introduction to the English edition,
p. x) : “A repetition of the experiment is impossible for
the simple reason that the original situation cannot
be reconstructed. Therefore in each instance there is 1
only a first and single answer.”

292 F or the commentary on the sign Fi, see op. cit ., vol.

I„ p. 178; and a reference in vol. II, p. 299.

293 The motif Of the “city on the mountain” is discussed
by K. Kerenyi in Das Ceheirnnis der hohen Slddlt ,

Europaische Revue , 1942, Juli-August-Heft ; and in Essays

on a Science of Mythology , Bollingen Series XXIII, p. 16.

294 Jung’s discussions of the motif of four appear, for
instance, in his Collected Works, vol. IX, XI, XII, and
XIV; but the problem of the four, with all its impli-
cations, is woven like a red thread through all his works.
297 For some of the symbolic meanings ascribed to
playing cards, see Handworlerhuch des Deutschen Abergtauhens ,
vol. IV, p. 1015, and vol. V, p. 11 10.

297 The symbolism of the number nine is discussed in
(among other works) F. V. Hopper’s Medieval Number
Symbolism . , 1938, p. 138.

299 Concerning the “night-sea-journey ” pattern of this
dream, see J. Jacobi, “The Process of I ndividuation,”
Journal of Analytical Psychology , vol. Ill, no. 2, 1958, p. 95.

300 The primitive belief in the power of bodily secretions

is discussed by F. Neumann in Origins of Consciousness
(German edition), p. 39.

Science and the unconscious M.-L. von Franz

304 Th e archetypes as nuclei of the psvche are discussed
by W. Pauli in Aufsdi.ze und Vortrage iiber Phys/k und
Erkenntnis-theone , Verlag Vieweg Braunschweig. 1961.

304 C Concerning the inspiring or inhibiting powe r of the
archetypes, see C. G. Jung and W. Pauli, Naturerklarung
und Psyche , Zurich, 1952, p. 163 and passim.

306 Pauli’s suggestion concerning biology appears in
Aufsdtze und Vortrage , op. cit., p. 123.

306 F or further explanation of the statement concerning
the time required for mutation, see Pauli, op. cit., pp. 123-25.

306 The story of Darwin and Wallace can be found in
Henshaw Ward’s Charles Darwin , 1927.

307 The reference to Descartes is expanded in M.-F. von
Franz’s “Der Traum des Descartes,” in Studien des C. C.

Jung Ins Li tuts , called “Zeitlose Dokuments der Seele.”

307 Kepler’s assertion is discussed by Jung and Pauli
in Naturerklarung und Psyche, op. cit., p. 117.

307 Heisenberg’s phrase was quoted by Hannah Arendt
in The Human Condition , Chicago Univ. Press, 1958, p. 26.

307 Pauli’s suggestion of parallel psychological and
physical studies appears in Naturerklarung, op. cit., p. 163.

307 For Niels Bohr’s ideas of complementarity, see his
Alomphysik und menschhche Erkenntms, Braunschweig, p. 26 ff.

308 “M omentum” (of a subatomic particle) is, in
German, Bewegu ngsgrosse .

308 Th e statement quoted from Pauli was quoted by
Jung in “The Spirit of Psychology,” in Jos. Campbell's
Coll. Papers of the Eranos Tear Book , Bollingen Series XXX,

1, N.Y. Pantheon Books, 1954, p. 439.

308 Pauli discusses the “primary possibilities” in
Vortrage, op. cit., p. 125.

308 The parallels between microphysics and
psychological concepts also appear in Vortrage: the
description of the unconscious by paradoxes, pp. 1 15-16;
the archetypes as “primary possibilities,” p. 115; the
unconscious as a “field,” p. 125.

309 The quotation from Gauss is translated from his
Werke , vol. X, p. 25, letter to Olbers, and is quoted in B. F.
van der Waerden, Einfall und IJeberlegung : Drei kleine
Beitrage zur Psychology des mathematischen Denkens,

Basel, 1954.

309 Poincare’s statement is quoted in ibid., p. 2.

309 Pauli’s belief that the concept of the unconscious
would affect all natural sciences is in Vortrage, p. 125.

309 The idea of the possible one-ness of life phenomena
was taken up by Pauli, ibid., p. 118.

309 For Jung’s ideas on the “synchronistic arrangement”
including matter and psyche, see his “Synchronieity : An
Acausal Connecting Principle,” Coll. Works vol. VIII.

309 Jung’s idea of the unus mundus follows some medieval
philosophic ideas in scholasticism (John Duns Scotus,
etc.) : The unus mundus was the total or archetypal
concept of the world in God’s mind before he put it into
actual reality.

309 T he quotation from Hannah Arendt appears in
The Human Condition, op. cit., p. 266.

309 For further discussion of “primary mathematical
intuitions,” see Pauli, Vortrage, p. 122; and also Ferd.
Conseth, “Fes mathematiques et la realite,” 1948.

310 Pauli, following Jung, points out that our conscious
representations are “ordered” before becoming conscious
in Vortrage , p. 122. See also Conseth, op. cit.

310 B. L. van der Waerden's statement is from his
Einfall und IJeberlegung, op. cit., p. 9.

3 1 5

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to captions
to illustrations.

aborigines, Australian, 95, 131 , 204, 205
active imagination, 206-7
Adam, 70, 82, 200-1
adolescence, 74, 117, 121, 130, 132, 287
advertising, 36, 50, 221, 224
Aeschbacher, Hans, 234
Aesculapius (Asklepios), 76, 154
African myths and rites, 24, 43, 45, 82, 235,
236, 237

alchemy, 30, 54, 68, 156, 204, 210, 246,
246 , 254, 262-3, 282

anima, 30, 31, 97, 123 O'., 152, 177 ff., 205,
216, 283, 289, 302; eroticism and, 179-80,
181 ; four stages of, 185-6, 185; as guide,
182-8, 186, 187 ; and mother, 125 O'.,
178-9; negative, 178-9, 178, 179, 180, 181 ;
personifications, 178, 180, 183, 185-8;

positive, 180 O'.; projection of, 180, 183,
188 ; worship of, 185-8

animals: in art, 234-9; in fairy tales, 137-9,
206, 207; in religious symbolism, 21, 29,
237-9, 239 ; as symbols of Self, 207; and
transcendence, 149 O’; see also totems
animus, 30, 97, 136 ff., 177, 189-95, 216;
and father, 189; four stages of, 194-5,
194; as group, 191, 192, 193; negative,
189, 191 ; positive, 192 O'.

Anthony, St., 49, 180
Apollo, 149

archetypes, 47, 66', 67 ff., 68, 81, 90, 96,
99, 304; definition of, 67-8; see also
symbols

A rend t, Hannah, 309
Ariadne, 125, 141
Arp, Jean (or Hans), 252, 259-60
art: “abstract,” 251, 252 ff., 261 ff. ; cave
paintings, 148, 235-7; imaginative, 246,
250 ff., 261 ff.; religious, 232, 237-9, 243,
243-5, 270, 271
Artcmidorus, 78

Arthur, King, 110, 111, 196, 1 98, 215, 215
Athena, 110, 185
atomic bomb, 101, 221
atoms, 22, 307

Bazaine, Jean, 250, 254, 268
Beatrice, 183, 186

“Beauty and the Beast,” 137-40, 193-4
Bible, the, 72, 74

bird, as symbol, 151-2, 153-7
Birkhauser, Peter, 187, 199
Bischof, Werner, 268, 268
Blake, William, 54, 72, 186, 219
Bluebeard, 190, 191

Bochlin, Arnold, 277, 278, 278, 281, 282
Bohr, Niels, 307, 308
Braque, Georges, 253
Brasilia, 213

Breton, Andre, 257, 258-9
Breuer, Josef, 26
Bronte, Emily, 190
Brueghel, Pieter, 86, 168
Buddha and Buddhism, 85, 101-2, 115,
152, 175, 224, 233, 240, 242; Zen, 75,
207, 233, 233, 241
bull, as symbol, 139, 147-8, 147

Caravaggio, Michelangelo, 47
Carra, Carlo, 254
Carroll, Lewis, 53
Chagall, Marc, 41, 127, 256, 257
Cheiron, 110, 111

childhood dreams, 165, 165; ego, 165-6;
memory, 99, 165

Chirico, Giorgio de, 170, 254-7 pass.

Christ, 21, 71, 72, 80, 81, 82, 83, 89, 108,
142, 145-7, 224, 239, 241; symbols of,
76, 238-9, 239, 270

Christianity, 21, 64, 72-4, 75, 85, 101-2,
142 ff., 185, 187, 238, 241, 245, 270
Christmas, 81, 107-8
Christopher, St., 218, 219
Churchill, Sir Winston, 173
Circe, 283

circle, symbol of, 240-9, 259; see also
mandala

circumcision rites, 131, 132, 237
civilization, stresses of, 45-7, 52, 93-6, 101
Cleopatra, 184
Cocteau, Jean, 178, 178
complementarity, 307, 308
complexes, 28, 29, 79

consciousness: evolution of, 23-5, 76, 98;
four functions of, 60, 61; limits of,

21, 229; separation from instinct, 83;
subliminal aspects, 39-43; and the un-
conscious, 32-8, 39-53, 64, 83-5; see also
ego

Cosmic Man, 200-2, 201, 202

Cranach, Lucas, 29, 86

cross, symbol of, 20, 80, 90, 91, 96, 243-5

cryptomnesia, 37-8

crystal, as symbol, 209, 211 \

crystal gazing, 28

Dali, Salvador, 257, 258
Danae, 280

dancing, 34, 35, 98, 236 , 236
Dante Alighieri, 183, 186
Darwin, Charles, 33, 56, 306
David ,222 '

death, 74, 75, 148, 189-91 ;;

Delacroix, Eugene, 120, 222

Delaunay, Robert, 247, 248
Demeter, 197
Democritus, 307
Descartes, Rene, 38, 307
diamond, as symbol, 21 7
Dionysus, 141 ff.
disk, symbol of, 215

dissociation, 24-5, 24, 52, 83-5, 213, 221 ,
222, 249

dragons, 41, 74, 120-1, 123, 125-6, 156
dreams, 20 ff., 38, 41, 63, 64, 72, 74, 76,
78; analogies in, 64, 78; analysis, 32,
43, 55-8, 96, 99; compensatory, 31, 50-3,
62-3, 67, 74, 95; descriptions and trans-
criptions, 43, 49, 50, 53-4, 56, 57, 66,
69 ff, 116, 132, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140,
145, 152-3, 163, 165, 169-71, 183-5, 192,
276 ff. pass.; dream books, 53; guidance
from, 208; individuation process and,
161-2; nature of, 39; primitive ideas
of, 52, 161-2; recurring, 33-4, 62, 160;
rejection of, 29, 31, 39, 50, 52; sexuality
in, 29, 92; sleep and, 63; the unconscious
and, 27 ff, 63-4, 78, 98; warnings from,
50-1, 74-5, 78
drugs, 259, 260
Duchamp, Marcel, 252-3

earth altar, 162, 162
Easter, symbolism of, 108, 142
Eckhart, Meister, 202
Eden, Garden of, 86

ego: and anima, 185; and animus, 193;
and hero myth, 112, 118-21, 123, 126-8,
132; and individuation, 165-7 ; and shadow,
118-21, 168 ff; and Self, 128 ff, 149, 161,
161-4, 197 ff, 208, 213 f., 240
Eleusinian mysteiies, 79, 148, 280
Elijah, 286
Eliot, T. S., 152
Elizabeth II, Queen, 71, 200
emotion, 61, 91, 99
Ensor, James, 296
Epona, 98
Epstein, Jacob, 47

Ernst, Max, 220, 233, 234, 253, 258, 260

Eros and Psyche, 193

von Eschenbach, Wolfram, 187

Escorial, Spain, 275

L'Etoile. Place de, 242

Eve, 185, 188

existentialism, 163

extra version and introversion, 58, 59-60,
171, 172

Ezekiel, vision of, 20, 45, 74

fairy tales, 167, 767, 193, 1.96, 1 97, 206,
207, 279, 289; Bath Badgerd, 216;

Beauty and the Beast, 137-40, 193;

Cinderella, 1 76, 197
Faust, 81, 121

feeling function, 61, 99, 185. 278. 286
Feiffer, Jules, 58

3 l6

fertility rites, 79, 106-8, 107 , 142, 147-8,
154-6, 235, 237, 286
Fierz-David, Linda, 145
fire, as symbol, 78
First Man, 200-2, 202
Flaubert, Gustave, 182
fortune telling, 28

four, motif of, 21 , 70, 71, 72, 112, 199,
200, 213, 225, 226, 240-2, 249, 289, 293,
299; and the anima, 185, 187 ; and the
animus, 194, 194; and the Self, 213
Frederick the Great, 55, 55
free association, 26-31, 27, 28
Freud, Sigmund, 25, 26, 47, 56, 63, 64,
67, 99, 227, 285; and dream analysis,
56-7; free association theory, 26-31; and
Jung, 57

Friedrich, Kaspar, 214
Fuseli, Henry, 63, 192

Gandhi, Mahatma, 58, 194
Gauguin, Paul, 184
Gauss, Karl, 308
Gayomart, 200, 217
George, St., 237

God, 72, 82, 186; “death of,” 255, 267;
dreams and, 102

Goethe, Johann W. von, 81, 121, 123,

185, 186, 277
Gossaert, Jan, 280

Goya, Francesco, 41, 65, 74

Grandville, Jean Gerard, 298

Great Mother, 81, 94, 95, 98, 125 ff., 141,

154, 205; 224, 225

Great rakes, Valentine, 286

Grosz, Georg, 283

Griinewald, Matthias, 49

Hades and Persephone, 189
Haffenrichter, Hans, 211
Haggard, H. Rider, 186, 187
Hare, myth of, 112 0'.

Heisenberg, Werner, 229, 307
Helen of Troy, 184
Hemingway, Ernest, 194
Hercules (Heracles), 110, 168
hermaphrodite, 30, 203 , 204, 278
Hermes, 154-6

Hermetic philosophy, 73, 156
hero myth, 72-3, 78-9, 110 ff., 128, 131 ff.,
266-7

Hinduism, 42, 90, 91, 92, 136, 151, 175 ,
203, 206, 237-8, 239
Hitler, Adolf, 79, 111, 173
Hobbes, Thomas, 201
Holy Ghost, 142-3

horse, as symbol, 98, 170, 174; winged,
156

Horus, 20, 21, 79, 242

hybris, 110, 113, 114, 121

Hypnerolomachia (Dream of Poiiphilo), 41,

186, 278

hysteria, 33-4, 34, 35: collective infection,
168

Icarus, 121

1 Ching or Book of Changes , The, 291-3,
291

imagination, 92
“imaginative” art, 246, 250 ff.
immortality, 87, 148
incest fear, 138-9

India, 43, 240; see also Hinduism,

Buddhism

individuation, 90, 160 ff. ; beginnings,

164-7; definition, 160-1; difficulties of,
166, 175-6; meandering pattern of, 160,
160 ; process of, 160 ff. ; and religion,
224-9; and society, 218-24
inferiority, 62-4

initiation rites, 74, 129 ff., 132, 134, 143,
146, 148, 153-4, 157

inspiration, 38, 306, 307; drugs and, 260
instinct, 52, 68, 69, 75-6, 83, 94, 239
introversion, see extraversion
intuition function, 60, 61, 92
Ishtar, 277
Isis, 186

Jacob’s dream, 209, 233

Jacoby, Erhard, 39, 229

James, William, 308

Jerusalem, 208 *

Joan of Arc, 189
Job, 73

Jonah, 119, 120

Jung, C. G., 9 ff., 26, 53, 56, 106, 107,
109, 118, 128, 129, 142-3, 149, 156, 160,
161, 162, 165, 168, 173, 177, 185, 198,

203 , 207, 208, 211, 212, 213, 225, 240,

241, 243, 247, 248, 249, 255, 257, 260,

261, 265, 267, 277, 281, 285, 287, 291,

294, 302, 304-10 pass.; and Freud, 26-8,
56-8

Kandinsky, W r assily, 247, 248, 250, 251-3,
265

Kant, Immanuel, 56
Kekule, Friedrich, 38, 38
Kepler, Johannes, 307
Klee, Paul, 167, 247, 248, 254, 262, 262 ,
263-4, 263, 269
Koran, the, 175
Krishna, 224

Kuhn, Herbert, 234-6 pass., 246, 250
Ku Klux Klan, 168
Kwan-Yin, 97, 187-8

landscapes, in dreams, 214, 215
Landseer, Edwin, 280
“laying on of hands,” 286, 286
Leda and the Swan, 239
Leger, Fernand, 270
Leonardo da Vinci, 27, 245
Leucippus, 307

Leviathan, 201 .

Levy-Briihl, Lucien, 24
Lippold, Richard, 230
Lloyd George, David, 194

Lourdes. 285
Lucia, St., festival of, 80
Lucifer, 72, 267
Lull, Raimon, 76
Lur^at, Jean, 268, 271
Luther, Martin, 175

Magdalen, St. Mary, 217
Magritte, Rene, 255
Malevich, Kasimir, 251, 253
mandala, 21, 158, 165 , 166, 199, 213-17,
213, 214, 215, 225, 227, 289, 299, 302;
in architecture, 242-5; in art, 240 ff.,
240, 242, 243, 246, 248
Manessier, Alfred, 268, 270, 271
Marc, Franz, 261, 262, 263
Marini, Marino, 266-7, 266’

Mark, St., 21, 89
marriage, 134, 137; sacred, 134-6
Mary, the Virgin, 118, 185, 185 , 187, 188,
285

masks, 24, 45, 104, 127, 236, 238
Mass, Catholic, 142-3
Masson, Andre, 217
Mathieu, Georges, 265
Matisse, Henri, 247
mediums, 77, 151
Medusa, 205
megalomania, 62-4, 89
menhirs, 233, 233
menstruation, 132
Mcphistopheles, 121
Mercury, 156
microphysics, 306-9
Miro, Joan, 253
“misoncism,” 23, 31, 33
Mithras, 147, 237
Mohammed, 156, 188, 210, 210
Mona Lisa, 185, 186
Mondrian, Piet, 248, 249, 262, 262, 263
moon, the, 97, 276, 277
Moricnus, 210
Moses, 45, 175
Mt. Williamson, 208
Mt. Rush more, 208
Mozart, Wolfgang, 178
mungu, 81

mysteries, 131, 141, 142; Eleusinian, 79,
148, 280

myths and mythology: Babylonian, 111,
237; Celtic, 98, 204; Chinese, 97, 187-8,
200, 201, 202; Egyptian, 19, 20, 22,
53, 55, 79, 89, 132, 155, 155, 156, 170,
171, 237-8, 242, 296; Eskimo, 177, 196,
216, 228; Greek, 51, 76, 76, 78-9, 90, 106,
107, 110, 111, 113, 114, 124, 124-5, 140,
141, 142-3, 142 fi, 1 44, 147, 154, 156,
177, 184, 185, 189, 193, 197, 205, 238, 239,
280, 282, 282; Haida Indians, 72; hero,
72-3, 110 ff, ; and individuation, 167;
Mayan, 42; Naskapi Indians, 161-2,
208, 213; Navaho Indians, 71, 74, 114,
114, 126, 213, 215; Norse, 108, 113,
122, 238; Persian, 108, 111, 147, 200,

317

217, 237; Pueblo Indians, 89; Roman,
110, 115 , 142, 144 , 154, 242; Scandinavian,
///; Slavonic, 1 78; Teutonic, 178

Nash, Paul, 248, 249

Navaho Indians, 71, 74, 114, 114, 126,
213, 215

Neumann, Erich, 304, 309
Nicholson, Ben, 246
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 37, 74, 255
No drama, 236, 238

numbers, mythological aspects of, 40,
42, 297, 307, 309-10; see also four
numinosity, 79, 93, 94-9, 101
Nut, 118, 132

obsession, 47
Oedipus, 181

oracles and omens, 51, 211, 290-3
Orpheus, 141 ff.

Osiris, 79

Palmanova, Italy, 242
Paul, St., 47, 89

Pauli, Wolfgang, 261, 307-9 pass.

Penn, William, 86
Perseus, 110, 125, 125
persona, 287, 287
phallus, 91-2, 143, 156
philosopher’s stone, 205, 210
phoenix, 297, 298
physics, nuclear, 261, 307 ff.

Picasso, Pablo, 147, 252, 253, 260
pig, as symbol, 148, 153, 154, 282, 283
Plutarch, 242
Poincare, Henri, 38, 309
Pollock, Jackson, 264, 264
Pompeii, 267

Priestley, J. B., 277, 278, 279, 304
primitives, 43, 52, 53, 55, 67, 74, 76, 79,
81, 88, 90, 93, 94, 98-9, 106-9, 110, 122,
126, 127, 128, 129, 140, 148, 149, 153-4,
1 77, 206, 208, 233-7, 233, 237, 239, 243,
246, 285, 286, 300; “bush soul,” 24, 24,
25, 45; initiation, 130 ff., 131, 134; obses-
sion, 47 ; possession, 34, 35
propaganda, 79, 86, 221, 222, 224
psyche: animal, 75-6; conjpass of, 60;
development of, 66, 67, 75-6, 99; nucleus
of, 161-7 pass., 196 ff. pass . ; structure,
161, 161, 165 ; totality of, 161-7 pass.,
196 ff. pass.

psychic associations, 27-31, 39-54
psychic manifestations, 55, 306
psychoanalysis: and Freud, 25-8, 56-8;

individual approach to, 57-8, 65-6, 92;
types in, 58 ff.
psychological types, 58 ff.

Pythagoreans, 40, 42

quaternity, see four

Radin, Paul, 112
Raven, 72

Read, Sir Herbert, 265

rebirth, 72, 74, 75, 107-9, 123, 130, 132,
145 ff., 296, 297
regression, 124

religion: and art, 235, 240 ff., 270; failure
of, 94, 101; and individuation, 224-9;
in modern life, 85-9, 101-2; symbolism
in, 21, 21, 55, 55, 75-6, 79, 80, 81, 82,
89, 89-91, 96, 108, 142-3, 145 ff., 225-6,
237-9, 239; see also Buddha, Christiani-
ty, Hinduism, Mohammed
Rembrandt, 103
Renaissance, the, 244-5, 253
Renoir, Auguste, 245
river crossing, motif of, 198, 199
Roditi, fidouard, 265-7
Rome, foundation of, 242
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 200
Rorschach, Hermann, 27
Rosati, James, 234
rose: white, 138, 241; window, 159
Russia, 28, 49, 86, 250

sacrifice, of hero, 1 20, 121-3, 131 ff. ; of
animals, 47, 147, 148, 237
Salome, 179
Sapientia, 185, 186
Satan, 72, 226, 227
scarab beetles, 296, 297
schizophrenia, 65, 261
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 56, 255
Schweitzer, Dr. Albert, 200
Schwitters, Kurt, 252, 253-4
Self, 128-9, 161 ff.; definition, 161, 161-2;
and ego, 128 ff., 162, 215-17; and indivi-
duation, 163-4; personifications of, 196
ff. ; realization of, 212 ff. ; and shadow,
173-6; social aspects of, 218 ff. ; symbols
of, 187, 207 ff., 212 ff., 240 ff., 302
sensation function, 60-1, 60, 240
serpents (and snakes), 35, 38, 70, 74,
76, 152, 154-6, 154, 239
sexual symbolism, 29, 29, 30, 91-2
shadow, 93, 118, 168 ff., 294
Shakespeare, William, 192
shamans, 149, 151, 177-8, 177, 236
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 194
signs, 20, 55, 55
Soulages, Pierre, 271, 271
spiral motif, 225-6, 227
spirit in matter, 205, 208, 253 ff.
square, symbol of the, 242, 246, 247,
248-9, 248
Stalin, J.V., 234
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 24, 38
stone, symbolism of, 43, 204, 205, 207,
208, 208-11, 210, 217, 232-5
sun symbols, 21, 22, 241, 246, 296, 303
superstition, 82, 94-6, 290
surrealism, 257-8, 258

Switzerland, 204, 219, 236, 276, 285, 298 f.
symbols and symbolism, 22, 29, 43, 52,
53, 55, 64, 66, 90, 90-9, 102, 103, 106-9,
118, 122-3, 127, 129, 132, 138, 142, 147,
149-57, 160-229 pass.; definition, 21-2,

54; in art, 232 ff . ; religious, 21, 21, 22,
55, 72-3, 75-6, 76, 79, 80, 81, 82, 89,
89-91, 90, 96, 108, 142-3, 145 ff., 185-7,
200-3, 224-9, 237-9; sexual, 29, 29, 30,
91-2 ; of totality, 196-211
synchronicity, 55, 211, 291, 306, 310

Tarzan, 194

Theseus, 110, 125, 125

thinking function, 60, 60-1

Thurber, James, 64, 78

Tibet: prayer wheel, 28; mandalas, 240

Tintoretto, 245

totality, circle symbols of, 240-9; other
symbols, 196-21 1 pass.
totems, 45, 129, 129, 237
de la Tour, Georges, 217
Trakl, Georg, 260
transcendence, 149 ff.

tree symbol, 43, 45, .76, 80, 81, 90, 153,
161-4, 187

Tremois, Pierre-Yves, 271

Trickster, 112 ff, 113, 140, 149, 151, 156

Trinity, the, 225, 307

Trois Freres caves, 235-6, 236

Tuc d’Audubert cave, 235-6

Turner, William, 289

Twins myth, 112 ff., 115, 124, 130, 132

unconscious, the, 20 ff. ; collective, 55,
67, 107; and consciousness, 32-8, 63-4;
and ego, 118, 217; fear and rejection of,
93, 98, 102; knowledge from, 37-8, 76-8,
76; neurosis and, 34; and religion, 55,
225-9; see also psyche

unidentified flying objects (UFOs), 249, 249
utopia concepts, 85, 86

Valentino, Rudolph, 194

Villa de Misteri (Pompeii), 143, 143

visions, 20, 45, 47

Voltaire, Francois, 220, 221

Waerden, B. L. van der, 310
Wagner, Richard, 193
war, motif of, 107, 108
Washington, George, 198
wise old man, 98, 196, 198
wise old woman, 196, 277, 279
witch doctors, 45, 82; see also shamans
witches, 177, 181, 188

women: as anima figures, 177 ff. ; and
the animus, 189 ff. ; and the irrational,
177, 177, 195; see also wise old woman,
Great Mother
word-association tests, 28
World War I, 120
World War II, 94, 108, 111, 198
Worringer, Wilhelm, 265

Yang and Yin, 290
yantra, 240, 240

zodiac, 237

318

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33(R); Titanic (director: Herbert Selpin), Germany, 1943,
121 (BR) ; Topix, London, 59(BL), 200(TR) ; Tosh odaiji Temple,
Japan, 175(BL); Trianon Press, Jura, France, from the Blake
Trust Facsimile of Songs of Innocence and of Experience , 219(TL).
Uni-Dia-Verlag, 19; USAF Academy, 129(BCi; U.S. Coast and
Geodetic Survey, 100(Ts; United States Information Service,
London, 221 (Ri; Vatican Museum, I27(TR); Verlag Hans
Huber, 27; Verlag Kurt Desch, Munchen, 79(BR ) ; Victoria and
Albert Museum, London, 48(B), 109(T)(BL), 115(BL), 136,
163, 1 74' BR 198(T C 203(MLj(BR . 206(ML;; Ville de

Strasbourg, 70; Volkswagen Ltd., 36. Collection of Walker Art
Center, Minneapolis, 260(BL); Wiener Library, (C) Auschwitz
Museum, Poland, 94(BR); courtesy the Wellcome Trust, 69,
246(TL), 286 (BR) ; Wide World, 11 7(BR); Gahan Wilson,
49(BL); Wulhenng Heights (director: William Wyler), U.S. A.,
1939, 190(T). Yale University Art Gallery, James Jackson Jarves
Collection, 180(TL). Zentralbibliothek, Zurich, 249(BR); ©
Mrs. Hans Zinsser, from G. F. Kunz, The Magic of Jewels and
Charms , 207 (ML); Zentralbibliothek Zurich, 248(TR).

Cover photograph : Tibetan Mandala, photo L. Courteville Top

Photographers :

Ansel Adams, 208(BL); Alinari, 46; David G. Allen, Bird
Photographs Inc., 68(F); Douglas Allen, 222(ML). Werner
Bischof, 22(BL), 269; Joachim Blauel, 261(B); Leonardo Bonzi,
135(BL) ; Edouard Boubat, 212(BL); Mike Busselle, 28(BR),
93(BL], collages 121(BL)(BR), 135(BR), 180(TR), 18KB),
I83(TR)(BR)‘ montages 190(T), 207(TL), 212(BR), 219(BR);
Francis Brunei, 239(TR). Robert Capa, 194(TMR), 198(B);
Cartier-Bresson, 34, 172(T); Chuzeville, 276(B); Franco Cian-
etti, 264(BL) ; Prof. E. J. Cole, 258(BR); J. B. Collins, 35(ML)
(MC); Ralph Crane, 117(BL). N. Elswing, 242(TR). John
Freeman, 105, 107(BL), 171 (TR), 195(TL), 197(TL), 259(MR),
281, 298(BL). Ewing Galloway, 82(BL) ; Marcel Gautherot, 213;
Georg Gerster, 109(BR); Roger Guillemot, 89. Ernst Haas,
146(BR) ; Leon Herschtritt, 84; Hinz, Basle, 1 27 ( L) , 219(BC),
258(T). Isaac, 35(BL). William Klein, 86(BL). Lavaud, 97(T),
1 59, 241 (BL) ; Louise Leiris, 261 (BL) ; Dr. Ivar Lissner, 149( BR) ;
Sandra Lousada at Whitecross Studio, 1 75(BR) ; Kurt & Margot
Lubinskv, 149(BL). Roger Mayne, 164(BR); Don McCullin,
287; St. Anthony Messenger, 143(B); Meyer, 29; John Moore,
72(R 238(BL)* 252(BL). Jack Nisberg, 256(TR). Michael
Peto, 164(BL) ; Axel Poignant, 95, 128, 130, 131, 204(MR).
Allen C. Reed, 74, 214(T). Sabat, 65(BR); Prof. Roger Sauler,
243(BL); Kees Scherer, 35(BR); Emil Schulthess, 201 (TC);
Carroll Seghers, 98 (TR); Brian Shu el, 55 (BR), 129(BR);
Dennis Stock, 238(T); David Sw'ann, 21, 48(B), 53(BL),
54(M), 66, 109(T)(BL), 110(BL), 115(’T)(BL), 133, 136,
155(T), 163, 1 74(BR), 186(BL), 188(BL), 190(BL), 198(TR),
203(BR) (ML), 206(ML), 264(BR), 302, 303. Felix Trombe,
234(TC). Y r illani & Figli Frl., 80(BL). Yoshio Watanabe,
232(B); Hans Peter Widmer, 305).

If the publishers have unwittingly infringed copyright in any
illustration reproduced they will gladly pay an appropriate fee
on being satisfied as to the owner's title.

3 -°

(Continued from front flap)

More than 500 illustrations comple-
ment the text and provide a unique
“running commentary” on Jung's
thought. They show the nature and
function of dreams; explore the sym-
bolic meaning of modern art; and re-
veal the psychological meanings of the
ordinary experiences of everyday life.
They are a reinforcement to Jung’s
thought and an integral part of Man
and His Symbols.

‘\ . . [Contemporary man] is blind to
the fact that, with all his rationality
and efficiency, he is possessed by ‘pow-
viial are beyond his control. His
gods and demons have not disappeared
at all; they have merely got new names.
They keep him on the run with rest-
lessness, vague apprehensions, psycho-
logical complications, an insatiable
need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food—
and, above all, an impressive array of
neuroses.”

Carl Gustav Jung

Tibetan Mandala photo R6alit6s Paris.

Printed in Spain

PHOTO <£> KARSH: OTTAWA

Man and his Symbols
Carl G.Jung